But, when all is said, it is not with work of this kind that
Olympus is stormed; art must be brought closer into relation with
life, these airy and delightful freaks of fancy must be subdued to
a serious scheme if they are to serve as credentials for a seat
among the immortals. The decorative painter, whose pencil runs so
freely in limning these half-human processions of outlined fauns
and wood-nymphs, is asked at last to paint an easel picture.

Stevenson is best where he shows most restraint, and his peculiarly
rich fancy, which ran riot at the suggestion of every passing whim,
gave him, what many a modern writer sadly lacks, plenty to
restrain, an exuberant field for self-denial. Here was an
opportunity for art and labour; the luxuriance of the virgin
forests of the West may be clipped and pruned for a lifetime with
no fear of reducing them to the trim similitude of a Dutch garden.
His bountiful and generous nature could profit by a spell of
training that would emaciate a poorer stock. From the first, his
delight in earth and the earth-born was keen and multiform; his
zest in life


'put a spirit of youth in everything,
That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him;'


and his fancy, light and quick as a child's, made of the world
around him an enchanted pleasance. The realism, as it is called,
that deals only with the banalities and squalors of life, and
weaves into the mesh of its story no character but would make you