the other arts, which, like proud debtors, would gladly pledge
their substance to repay an obligation that they cannot disclaim.
Let one more attempt to supply literature with a parallel be quoted
from the works of a writer on style, whose high merit it is that he
never loses sight, either in theory or in practice, of the
fundamental conditions proper to the craft of letters. Robert
Louis Stevenson, pondering words long and lovingly, was impressed
by their crabbed individuality, and sought to elucidate the laws of
their arrangement by a reference to the principles of architecture.
"The sister arts," he says, "enjoy the use of a plastic and ductile
material, like the modeller's clay; literature alone is condemned
to work in mosaic with finite and quite rigid words. You have seen
those blocks, dear to the nursery: this one a pillar, that a
pediment, a third a window or a vase. It is with blocks of just
such arbitrary size and figure that the literary architect is
condemned to design the palace of his art. Nor is this all; for
since these blocks or words are the acknowledged currency of our
daily affairs, there are here possible none of those suppressions
by which other arts obtain relief, continuity, and vigour: no
hieroglyphic touch, no smoothed impasto, no inscrutable shadow, as
in painting; no blank wall, as in architecture; but every word,
phrase, sentence, and paragraph must move in a logical progression,
and convey a definite conventional import."

It is an acute comparison, happily indicative of the morose
angularity that words offer to whoso handles them, admirably
insistent on the chief of the incommodities imposed upon the
writer, the necessity, at all times and at all costs, to mean
something. The boon of the recurring monotonous expanse, that an
apprentice may fill, the breathing-space of restful mechanical