without feeling
that he has been throughout in the company of a spirit various indeed
and many-mooded, but profoundly sincere and real. Ways that in another
might easily have been mere signs of affectation were in him the true
expression of a nature ten times more spontaneously itself and
individually alive than that of others. Self-consciousness, in many
characters that possess it, deflects and falsifies conduct; and so does
the dramatic instinct. Stevenson was self-conscious in a high degree,
but only as a part of his general activity of mind; only in so far as he
could not help being an extremely intelligent spectator of his own
doings and feelings: these themselves came from springs of character and
impulse much too deep and strong to be diverted. He loved also, with a
child's or actor's gusto, to play a part and make a drama out of life:
but the part was always for the moment his very own: he had it not in
him to pose for anything but what he truly was.

"When a man so constituted had once mastered his craft of letters, he
might take up whatever instrument he pleased with the instinctive and
just confidence that he would play upon it to a tune and with a manner
of his own. This is indeed the true mark and test of his originality. He
has no need to be, or to seem, especially original in the form and mode
of literature which he attempts. By his choice of these he may at any
time give himself and his reader the pleasure of recalling, like a
familiar air, some strain of literary association; but in so doing he
only adds a secondary charm to his work; the vision, the temperament,
the mode of conceiving and handling, are in every case personal to
himself. He may try his hand in youth at a _Sentimental Journey_, but R.
L. S. cannot choose but be at the opposite pole of human character and
feeling from Laurence Sterne. In tales of mystery, allegorical or other,
he may bear in mind the precedent of Edgar Poe, and yet there is nothing
in style and temper much wider apart than _Markheim_ and _Jekyll and
Hyde_ are from the _Murders in the Rue Morgue_ or _William Wilson_. He
may set out to tell a pirate story for boys 'exactly in the ancient
way,' and it will come from him not in the ancient way at all, but
re-minted; marked with a sharpness and saliency in the characters, a
private stamp of buccaneering ferocity combined with smiling humour, an
energy of vision and happy vividness of presentment, which are shiningly
his own.