I do not care to speak of great ideas, for I am unable to see how an idea can exist, at all events can be great out of language; an allusion to Mr. Stevenson’s verbal expression will perhaps make my meaning clear.  His periods are fresh and bright, rhythmical in sound, and perfect realizations of their sense; in reading you often think that never before was such definiteness united to such poetry of expression; every page and every sentence rings of its individuality.  Mr. Stevenson’s style is over smart, well-dressed, shall I say, like a young man walking in the Burlington Arcade?  Yes, I will say so, but, I will add, the most gentlemanly young man that ever walked in the Burlington.  Mr. Stevenson is competent to understand any thought that might be presented to him, but if he were to use it, it would instantly become neat, sharp, ornamental, light, and graceful; and it would lose all its original richness and harmony.  It is not Mr. Stevenson’s brain that prevents him from being a thinker, but his style.

Another thing that strikes me in thinking of Stevenson (I pass over his direct indebtedness to Edgar Poe, and his constant appropriation of his methods), is the unsuitableness of the special characteristics of his talent to the age he lives in.  He wastes in his limitations, and his talent is vented in prettinesses of style.  In speaking of Mr. Henry James, I said that, although he had conceded much to the foolish, false, and hypocritical taste of the time, the concessions he made had in little or nothing impaired his talent.  The very opposite seems to me the case with Mr. Stevenson.  For if any man living in this end of the century needed freedom of expression for the distinct development of his genius, that man is R.L.  Stevenson.  He who runs may read, and he with any knowledge of literature will, before I have written the words, have imagined Mr. Stevenson writing in the age of Elizabeth or Anne.

Turn your platitudes prettily, but write no word that could offend the chaste mind of the young girl who has spent her morning reading the Colin Campbell divorce case; so says the age we live in.  The penny paper that may be bought everywhere, that is allowed to lie on every table, prints seven or eight columns of filth, for no reason except that the public likes to read filth; the poet and novelist must emasculate and destroy their work because....  Who shall come forward and make answer?  Oh, vile, filthy, and hypocritical century, I at least scorn you.

But this is not a course of literature but the story of the artistic development of me, Edward Dayne; so I will tarry no longer with mere criticism, but go direct to the book to which I owe the last temple in my soul—­“Marius the Epicurean.”  Well I remember when I read the opening lines, and how they came upon me sweetly as the flowing breath of a bright spring.  I knew that I was awakened a fourth time, that a fourth vision of life was to be given to me.  Shelley had revealed to me the