As to influence, it would seem modest to assert that Meredith is as bracingly wholesome morally as he is intellectually stimulating.  In a private letter to a friend who was praising his finest book, he whimsically mourns the fact that he must write for a living and hence feel like disowning so many of his children when in cold blood he scrutinizes his offspring.  The letter in its entirety (it is unpublished) is proof, were any needed, that he had a high artistic ideal which kept him nobly dissatisfied with his endeavor.  There is in him neither pose nor complacent self-satisfaction.  To an American, whom he was bidding good-by at his own gate, he said:  “If I had my books to do over again, I should try harder to make sure their influence was good.”  His aims, ethical and artistic, throughout his work, can be relied upon as high and noble.  His faults are as honest as he himself, the inherent defects of his genius.  No writer of our day stands more sturdily for the idea that, whereas art is precious, personality is more precious still; without which art is a tinkling cymbal and with which even a defective art can conquer Time, like a garment not all-seemly, that yet cannot hide an heroic figure.

CHAPTER XIII

STEVENSON

It is too early yet to be sure that Robert Louis Stevenson will make a more cogent appeal for a place in English letters as a writer of fiction than as an essayist.  But had he never written essays likely to rank him with the few masters of that delightful fireside form, he would still have an indisputable claim as novelist.  The claim in fact is a double one; it is founded, first, on his art and power as a maker of romance, but also upon his historical service to English fiction, as the man most instrumental in purifying the muddy current of realism in the late nineteenth century by a wholesome infusion,—­the romantic view of life.  It is already easier to estimate his importance and get the significance of his work than it was when he died in 1894—­stricken down on the piazza of his house at Vailima, a Scotchman doomed to fall in a far-away, alien place.

We are better able now to separate that personal charm felt from direct contact with the man, which almost hypnotized those who knew him, from the more abiding charm which is in his writings:  the revelation of a character the most attractive of his generation.  Rarely, if ever before, have the qualities of artistry and fraternal fellowship been united in a man of letters to such a degree; most often they are found apart, the gods choosing to award their favors less lavishly.

Because of this union of art and life, Stevenson’s romances killed two birds with one stone; boys loved his adventuresomeness, the wholesome sensationalism of his stories with something doing on every page, while amateurs of art responded to his felicity of phrase, his finished technique, the exhibition of craftsmanship conquering difficulty and danger.  Artist, lover of life, insistent truth-teller, Calvinist, Bohemian, believer in joy, all these cohabit in his hooks.  In early masterpieces like “Treasure Island” and “The Wrecker” it is the lover of life who conducts us, telling the story for story’s sake: