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

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

II

these orgies of work, and you scarce able for a letter. But Lord! Colvin, how
lucky the situations are not reversed, for I have no situation, nor am fit for any.
Life is a steigh brae. Here, have at Knappe, and no more clavers!
If he talked profusely-and this is perfect talk-if he loved to
talk above all of his work in hand, it was because, though perpetually frail, he was never inert, and did a thing, if he did it
at all, with passion. He was not fit, he says, for a situation, but
a situation overtook him inexorably at Vailima, and doubtless
at last indeed swallowed him up. His position, with differences, comparing in some respects smaller things to greater,
and with fewer differences after all than likenesses, his position
resembles that of Scott at Abbotsford, just as, sound, sensible
and strong on each side in spite of the immense gift of dramatic
and poetic vision, the earlier and the later man had something
of a common nature. Life became bigger for each than the
answering effort could meet, and in their death they were not
divided. Stevenson's late emancipation was a fairytale only
because he himself was in his manner a magician. He liked to
handle many matters and to shrink from none; nothing can
exceed the impression we get of the things that in these years he
dealt with from day to day and as they came up, and the things
that, as well, almost without order or relief, he planned and
invented, took up and talked of and dropped, took up and talked
of and carried through.,/Had I space to treat myself to a clue for
selection from the whole record there is nothing I should better
like it to be than a tracking of his " literary opinions " and
literary projects, the scattered swarm of his views, sympathies,
antipathies, obiter dicta, as an artist-his flurries and fancies,
imaginations, evocations, quick infatuations, as a teller of possible tales. Here is a whole little circle of discussion, yet such a
circle that to engage one's self at all is to be too much engulfed.
His overflow on such matters is meanwhile amusing enough
as mere spirits and sport-interesting as it would yet be to
catch as we might, at different moments, the congruity between
the manner of his feeling a fable in the germ and that of his
afterwards handling it. There are passages again and again that
light strikingly what I should call his general conscious method