en pain us. The dull neglected peasant, sunk in
matter, insolent, gross and servile, makes a startling contrast to our
own long-legged, long-headed, thoughtful, Bible-loving ploughman. A
week or two in such a place as Suffolk leaves the Scotsman gasping. It
seems impossible that within the boundaries of his own island a class
should have been thus forgotten. Even the educated and intelligent
who hold our own opinions and speak in our own words, yet seem to hold
them with a difference or from another reason, and to speak on all
things with less interest and conviction. The first shock of English
society is like a cold plunge." {8}

As there was a great deal of the "John Bull element" {9} in the little
dreamer De Quincey, so there was a great deal, after all, of the rather
conceited Calvinistic Scot in R. L. Stevenson, and it is to be traced as
clearly in certain of his fictions as anywhere, though he himself would
not perhaps have seen it and acknowledged it, as I am here forced now to
see it, and to acknowledge it for him.

CHAPTER XVII--PROOFS OF GROWTH

Once again I quote Goethe:

"Natural simplicity and repose are the acme of art, and hence it
follows no youth can be a master."

It has to be confessed that seldom, if ever, does Stevenson naturally and
by sheer enthusiasm for subject and characters attain this natural
simplicity, if he often attained the counterfeit presentment--artistic
and graceful euphony, and new, subtle, and often unexpected
concatenations of phrase. Style is much; but it is not everything. We
often love Scott the more that he shows loosenesses and lapses here, for,
in spite of them, he gains natural simplicity, while not seldom
Stevenson, with all his art and fine sense of verbal music, rather misses
it. _The Sedulous Ape_ sometimes disenchants as well as charms; for
occasionally a word, a touch, a turn, sends us off too directly in search
of the model; and this operates against the interest as introducing a new
and alien series of associations, where, for full effect, it should not
be so. And this distraction will be the more insistent, the more
knowledge the reader has and the more he remembers; and since Stevenson's
first appeal, both by his spirit and his methods, is to the cultured and
well read, rather than to the great mass, his "sedulous apehood" only the
more directly wars against him as regards deep, continuous, and lasting
impress