And the buccaneers themselves, how simple and yet how effective are the little touches which indicate their ways of thinking and of acting.  “I want to go in that cabin, I do; I want their pickles and wine and that.”  “Now, if you had sailed along o’ Bill you wouldn’t have stood there to be spoke twice—­not you.  That was never Bill’s way, not the way of sich as sailed with him.”  Scott’s buccaneers in “The Pirate” are admirable, but they lack something human which we find here.  It will be long before John Silver loses his place in sea fiction, “and you may lay to that.”

Stevenson was deeply influenced by Meredith, and even in these books the influence of the master is apparent.  There is the apt use of an occasional archaic or unusual word, the short, strong descriptions, the striking metaphors, the somewhat staccato fashion of speech.  Yet, in spite of this flavour, they have quite individuality enough to constitute a school of their own.  Their faults, or rather perhaps their limitations, lie never in the execution, but entirely in the original conception.  They picture only one side of life, and that a strange and exceptional one.  There is no female interest.  We feel that it is an apotheosis of the boy-story—­the penny number of our youth in excelsis.  But it is all so good, so fresh, so picturesque, that, however limited its scope, it still retains a definite and well-assured place in literature.  There is no reason why “Treasure Island” should not be to the rising generation of the twenty-first century what “Robinson Crusoe” has been to that of the nineteenth.  The balance of probability is all in that direction.

The modern masculine novel, dealing almost exclusively with the rougher, more stirring side of life, with the objective rather than the subjective, marks the reaction against the abuse of love in fiction.  This one phase of life in its orthodox aspect, and ending in the conventional marriage, has been so hackneyed and worn to a shadow, that it is not to be wondered at that there is a tendency sometimes to swing to the other extreme, and to give it less than its fair share in the affairs of men.  In British fiction nine books out of ten have held up love and marriage as the be-all and end-all of life.  Yet we know, in actual practice, that this may not be so.  In the career of the average man his marriage is an incident, and a momentous incident; but it is only one of several.  He is swayed by many strong emotions—­his business, his ambitions, his friendships, his struggles with the recurrent dangers and difficulties which tax a man’s wisdom and his courage.  Love will often play a subordinate part in his life.  How many go through the world without ever loving at all?  It jars upon us then to have it continually held up as the predominating, all-important fact in life; and there is a not unnatural tendency among a certain school, of which Stevenson is certainly the leader, to avoid altogether a source of interest which has been so misused and overdone.  If all love-making were like that between Richard Feverel and Lucy Desborough, then indeed we could not have too much of it; but to be made attractive once more, the passion must be handled by some great master who has courage to break down conventionalities and to go straight to actual life for his inspiration.