nonce, my skill deserts me, such as it is, or was. It was a very
little dose of inspiration, and a pretty little trick of style,
long lost, improved by the most heroic industry. So far, I have
managed to please the journalists. But I am a fictitious article,
and have long known it. I am read by journalists, by my
fellow-novelists, and by boys; with these _incipit et explicit_
my vogue."

I appeal to all who earn their living by pen or brush--Who does not
know moods such as this? Who has not experience of those dark days
when the ungrateful canvas refuses to come right, and the artist sits
down before it and calls himself a fraud? We may even say that these
fits of incapacity and blank despondency are part of the cost of all
creative work. They may be intensified by terror for the family
exchequer. The day passes in strenuous but futile effort, and the man
asks himself, "What will happen to me and mine if this kind of thing
continues?" Stevenson, we are allowed to say (for the letters tell
us), did torment himself with these terrors. And we may say further
that, by whatever causes impelled, he certainly worked too hard during
the last two years of his life. With regard to the passage quoted,
what seems to me really melancholy is not the baseless self-distrust,
for that is a transitory malady most incident to authorship; but that,
could a magic carpet have transported Stevenson at that moment to the
side of the friend he addressed--could he for an hour or two have
visited London--all this apprehension had been at once dispelled. He
left England before achieving his full conquest of the public heart,
and the extent of that conquest he, in his exile, never quite
realized. When he visited Sydney, early in 1893, it was to him a new
and disconcerting experience--but not, I fancy altogether
unpleasing--_digito monstrari_, or, as he puts it elsewhere, to "do