ten thousand
things learned from books and not drawn directly from real life.

The form and setting in which the boy learns of matters sticks in the
mind as a part of the matters themselves. He cannot disentangle what is
conventional from what is original, because he has not yet a first-hand
acquaintance with life by which to interpret.

Every schoolboy of talent writes essays in the style of Addison, because
he is taught that this is the correct way of writing. He has no means
of knowing that in writing in this manner he is using his mind in a very
peculiar and artificial way,--a way entirely foreign to Addison himself;
and that he is really striving not so much to say something himself as
to reproduce an effect.

There is one thing which young people do not know, and which they find
out during the process of growing up,--and that is that good things in
art have been done by men whose entire attention was absorbed in an
attempt to tell the truth, and who have been chiefly marked by a deep
unconsciousness.

To a boy, the great artists of the world are a lot of necromancers,
whose enchantments can perhaps be stolen and used again. To a man, they
are a lot of human beings, and their works are parts of them. Their
works are their hands and their feet, their organs, dimensions, senses,
affections, passions. To a man, it is as absurd to imitate the manner of
Dean Swift in writing as it would be to imitate the manner of Dr.
Johnson in eating. But Stevenson was not a man, he was a boy; or, to
speak more accurately, the attitude of his mind towards his work
remained unaltered from boyhood till death, though his practice and
experiment gave him, as he grew older, a greater mastery over his
materials. It is in this attitude of Stevenson's mind toward his own
work that we must search for the heart of his mystery.

He conceived of himself as "an artist," and of his writings as
performances. As a consequence, there is an undertone of insincerity in
almost everything which he has written. His attention is never wholly
absorbed in his work, but is greatly taken up with the notion of how
each stroke of it is going to appear.

We have all experienced, while reading his books, a certain undefinable
suspicion which interferes with the enjoyment of some people, and
enhances that of others. It is not so much the cream-tarts themselves
that we suspect, as the motive of the giver.

"I am in the habit," said Prince Florizel, "of look