The reason why Stevenson represents a backward movement in literature,
is that literature lives by the pouring into it of new words from
speech, and new thoughts from life, and Stevenson used all his powers to
exclude both from his work. He lived and wrote in the past. That this
Scotchman should appear at the end of what has been a very great period
of English literature, and summarize the whole of it in his two hours'
traffic on the stage, gives him a strange place in the history of that
literature. He is the Improvisatore, and nothing more. It is impossible
to assign him rank in any line of writing. If you shut your eyes to try
and place him, you find that you cannot do it. The effect he produces
while we are reading him vanishes as we lay down the book, and we can
recall nothing but a succession of flavors. It is not to be expected
that posterity will take much interest in him, for his point and meaning
are impressional. He is ephemeral, a shadow, a reflection. He is the
mistletoe of English literature whose roots are not in the soil but in
the tree.
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