can enlarge your acquaintance with Meredith to your own exceeding
profit, for he is one of the great masters of fiction, who used the
novel merely to preach his doctrine of the richness and fulness of
human life if we would but see it with his eyes.

STEVENSON PRINCE OF MODERN STORY-TELLERS

HIS STORIES OF ADVENTURE AND HIS BRILLIANT ESSAYS--"TREASURE
ISLAND" AND "DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE" HIS MOST POPULAR BOOKS.

It is as difficult to criticise the work of Robert Louis Stevenson as
it is to find faults in the friend that you love as a brother. For
with all his faults, this young Scotchman with his appealing charm
disarms criticism. Nowhere in all literature may one find his like for
warming the heart unless it be Charles Lamb, of gracious memory, and
the secret of this charm is that Stevenson remained a child to the end
of his days, with all a child's eagerness for love and praise, and
with all a child's passion for making believe that his puppets are
real flesh and blood people. When such a nature is endowed with
consummate skill in the use of words, then one gets the finest, if not
the greatest, of creative artists.

In sheer technical skill Stevenson stands head and shoulders above all
the other literary craftsmen of his day; but this skill was not used
to refine his meaning until it wearied the reader, as in the case of
Henry James, nor was it used to bewilder him with the richness of his
resources, as was too often the case with George Meredith. With
Stevenson, style had actually become the man; he could not write the
simplest article in any other than a highly finished literary way.
Witness the amazingly eloquent defense of Father Damien which he
dashed off in a few hours and read to his wife and his stepson before
the ink was dry on the sheets.

Above all other things Stevenson was a great natural story-teller.
With him the story was the main consideration, yet in some of his
short tales such as _Markheim_, or _A Lodging for the Night_, or _The
Sire de Maletroit's Door_, the story itself merely serves as a thread
upon which he has strung the most remarkable analysis of a man's soul.
He has the distinction of having written in _Treasure Island_ the best
piratical story of the last century. If he could have maintained the
high level of the opening chapter he would have produced a work
worthy to rank with _Robinson Crusoe_. As it is, he created two
villains, the blind man Pew and John Silver, wh