Stevenson rejects his own style as not good enough
for him, not direct enough, not unconscious enough; he will have theirs.
And so he goes out in quest of purity and truth, and brings home an
elaborate archaism.
Although we think of Stevenson as a writer of fiction, his extreme
popularity is due in great measure to his innumerable essays and bits
of biography and autobiography, his letters, his journals, and travels
and miscellaneous reminiscences.
It was his own belief that he was a very painstaking and conscientious
artist, and this is true to a great extent. On the day of his death he
was engaged upon the most highly organized and ambitious thing he ever
attempted, and every line of it shows the hand of an engraver on steel.
But it is also true that during the last years of his life he lived
under the pressure of photographers and newspaper syndicates, who came
to him with great sums of money in their hands. He was exploited by the
press of the United States, and this is the severest ordeal which a
writer of English can pass through.
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