is
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 unimagined skies
where the spirit sings of light and grace; Gautier had shown me how
extravagantly beautiful is the visible world and how divine is the rage of
the flesh; and with Balzac I had descended circle by circle into the nether
world of the soul, and watched its afflictions. Then there were minor
awakenings. Zola had enchanted me with decoration and inebriated me with
theory; Flaubert had astonished with the wonderful delicacy and subtlety of
his workmanship; Goncourt's brilliant adjectival effects had captivated me
for a time, but all these impulses were crumbling into dust, these
aspirations were etiolated, sickly as faces gro