Notes on novelists, with some other notes, by Henry James.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

7

first that strike the note above all characteristic, show his imagination always at play, for drollery or philosophy, with his circumstances. The difficulty in writing of him under the personal
impression is to suggest enough how directly his being the
genius that he was kept counting in it. In I879 he writes from
Monterey to Mr. Edmund Gosse, in reference to certain grave
symptoms of illness: " I may be wrong, but... I believe I
must go.... But death is no bad friend; a few aches and
gasps, and we are done; like the truant child, I am beginning
" to grow weary and timid in this big, jostling city, and could run
to my nurse, even although she should have to whip me before
putting me to bed." This charming renunciation expresses
itself at the very time his talent was growing finer; he was so
fond of the sense of youth and the idea of play that he saw
whatever happened to him in images and figures, in the
terms almost of the sports of childhood. "Are you coming
over again to see me some day soon e I keep returning, and
now hand over fist, from the realms of Hades. I saw that
gentleman between the eyes, and fear him less after each visit.
Only Charon and his rough boatmanship I somewhat fear."
The fear remained with him, sometimes greater, sometimes
less, during the first years after his marriage, those spent abroad
and in England in health resorts, and it marks constantly, as one
may say, one end of the range of his humour-the humour
always busy at the other end with the impatience of timidities
and precautions and the vision and invention of essentially
open-air situations. It was the possibility of the open-air situation that at last appealed to him as the cast worth staking all
for-on which, as usual in his admirable rashnesses, he was
extraordinarily justified. " No man but myself knew all my
bitterness in those days. Remember that, the next time you
think I regret my exile.... Remember the pallid brute that
lived in Skerryvore like a weevil in a biscuit."
He found after an extraordinarily adventurous quest the
treasure island, the climatic paradise that met, that enhanced