that lesser truth which means accurate photography—­his books give us both; the modern novelist, even a romancer like Stevenson, is not permitted to slight a landscape, an idiom nor a point of psychology:  this one is never untrue to the trust.  There is in the very nature of his language a proof of his strong hunger for the actual, the verifiable.  No man of his generation has quite such a grip on the vernacular:  his speech rejoices to disport itself in root flavors; the only younger writer who equals him in this relish for reality of expression is Kipling.  Further back it reminds of Defoe or Swift, at their best, Stevenson cannot abide the stock phrases with which most of us make shift to express our thoughts instead of using first-hand effects.  There is, with all its music and suavity, something of the masculinity of the Old English in the following brief descriptive passage from “Ebb-Tide”: 

There was little or no morning bank.  A brightening came in the East; then a wash of some ineffable, faint, nameless hue between crimson and silver; and then coals of fire.  These glimmered awhile on the sea line, and seemed to brighten and darken and spread out; and still the night and the stars reigned undisturbed.  It was as though a spark should catch and glow and creep along the foot of some heavy and almost incombustible wall-hanging, and the room itself be scarce menaced.  Yet a little after, and the whole East glowed with gold and scarlet, and the hollow of heaven was filled with the daylight.  The isle—­the undiscovered, the scarce believed in—­now lay before them and close aboard; and Herrick thought that never in his dreams had he beheld anything more strange and delicate.

Stevenson’s similes, instead of illustrating concrete things by others less concrete, often reverse the process, as in the following:  “The isle at this hour, with its smooth floor of sand, the pillared roof overhead and the pendant illumination of the lamps, wore an air of unreality, like a deserted theater or a public garden at midnight.”  Every image gets its foothold in some tap-root of reality.

The place of Robert Louis Stevenson is not explained by emphasizing the perfection of his technique.  Artist he is, but more:  a vigorous modern mind with a definite and enheartening view of things, a philosophy at once broad and convincing.  He is a psychologist intensely interested in the great questions—­which, of course, means the moral questions.  Read the quaint Fable in which two of the characters in “Treasure Island” hold converse upon themselves, the story in which they participate and the author who made them.  It is as if Stevenson stood aside a moment from the proper objectivity of the fictionist, to tell us in his own person that all his story-making was but an allegory of life, its joy, its mystery, its duty, its triumph and its doom.  Although he is too much the artist to intrude philosophic comments upon human fate into his fiction, after the fashion