VII THE LETTERS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON We have fallen upon an age of notes and notelets. The old leisureliness requisite for the cultivation of the epistolary art is ours no longer. The demon of haste lurks at our elbow, and we no longer take time to observe the amenities of friendship. In days that are past a letter was at once a news-sheet, a record of mental taste and delight, and a flashing mirror of the heart. Every word exhaled an aroma of personality. Now we receive a few type-written lines of colorless language, and we must accept them forsooth as a letter. Yet these latter years have not been wholly devoid of the kindly instincts of the genuine letterwriter; and when we turn to the correspondence of Lowell, the Brownings, Dante Rossetti, and Robert Louis Stevenson it is like breathing again the atmosphere in which Keats, Cowper, Schiller, and Lamb indited letters with a pen dipped in their own hearts. The It is posterity that pronounces final judgment upon a writer. He may fill a large and unique place among his contemporaries, and seem to the eyes that look upon his own day as destined to a seat among the immortals, but it is those who come after him to whom is committed the ultimate adjudication of his claims to remembrance. writer who lacks vitality and a fecund and fertilizing power over others will, immediately that death has vindicated his universal sway, quietly slip into the limbo of forgetfulness. But he in whose veins life warms and riots, who makes his pages breathe with a full and healthy scope, who appeals to the fundamental instincts and loves of humankind, may falter for a little while in his march toward the Pantheon of perpetual renown, but sooner or later he assuredly arrives. Robert Louis Stevenson was an artist, curious and delightful, dealing with his sub |