themselves inappropriately. Stevenson's general freedom from this fault implies that hatred to the commonplace formula of which I have spoken. His words are always alive. He came to insist chiefly upon the importance of condensation. 'There is but one art,' he says, 'the art to omit'; or, as Pope puts it, perhaps more accurately, 'the last and greatest art' is 'the art to blot.' That is a corollary from the theory of the right word. A writer is an 'amateur,' says Stevenson, 'who says in two sentences what can be said in one.' The artist puts his whole meaning into one perfectly accurate line, while a feebler hand tries to correct one error by superposing another, and ends by making a blur of the whole.
Stevenson, by whatever means, acquired not only a delicate style, but a style of his own. If it sometimes reminds one of models, it does not suggest that he is speaking in a feigned voice. I think, indeed, that this precocious preoccupation with style suggests the excess of self-consciousness which was his most obvious weakness; a daintiness which does not allow us to forget the presence of the artist. But Stevenson did not yield to other temptations which beset the lover of exquisite form. He was no 'æsthete' in the sense
