him clouds of glory, this happy starred, full-blooded spirit shoots
into the spiritual land.'


But we on this side are the poorer - by how much we can never know.
What strengthens the conviction that he might yet have surpassed
himself and dwarfed his own best work is, certainly no immaturity,
for the flavour of wisdom and old experience hangs about his
earliest writings, but a vague sense awakened by that brilliant
series of books, so diverse in theme, so slight often in structure
and occasions so gaily executed, that here was a finished literary
craftsman, who had served his period of apprenticeship and was
playing with his tools. The pleasure of wielding the graven tool,
the itch of craftsmanship, was strong upon him, and many of the
works he has left are the overflow of a laughing energy, arabesques
carved on the rock in the artist's painless hours.

All art, it is true, is play of a sort; the 'sport-impulse' (to
translate a German phrase) is deep at the root of the artist's
power; Sophocles, Shakespeare, Moliere, and Goethe, in a very
profound sense, make game of life. But to make game of life was to
each of these the very loftiest and most imperative employ to be
found for him on this planet; to hold the mirror up to Nature so
that for the first time she may see herself; to 'be a candle-holder
and look on' at the pageantry which, but for the candle-holder,
would huddle along in the undistinguishable blackness, filled them
with the pride of place. Stevenson had the sport-impulse at the
depths of his nature, but he also had, perhaps he had inherited, an
instinct for work in more blockish material, for lighthouse-
building and iron-founding. In a 'Letter to a Young Artist,'