of Thackeray or Meredith, the comment is there, implicit in his fiction, even as it is explicit in his essays, which are for this reason a sort of complement of his fiction:  a sort of philosophical marginal note upon the stories.  Stevenson was that type of modern mind which, no longer finding it possible to hold fast by the older, complacent cock-sureness with regard to the theologian’s heaven, is still unshaken in its conviction that life is beneficent, the obligation of duty imperative, the meaning of existence spiritual.  Puzzlingly protean in his expressional moods (his conversations in especial), he was constant in this intellectual, or temperamental, attitude:  “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him,” represents his feeling, and the strongest poem he ever wrote, “If This Were Faith,” voices his deepest conviction.  Meanwhile, the superficies of life offered a hundred consolations, a hundred pleasures, and Stevenson would have his fellowmen enjoy them in innocence, in kindness and good cheer.  In fine, as a thinker he was a modernized Calvinist; as an artist he saw life in terms of action and pleasure, and by perfecting himself in the art of communicating his view of life, he was able, in a term of years all too short, to leave a series of books which, as we settle down to them in the twentieth century, and try to judge them as literature, have all the semblance of fine art.  In any case, they will have been influential in the shaping of English fiction and will be referred to with respect by future historians of literature.  It is hard to believe that the desiccation of Time will so dry them that they will not always exhale a rich fragrance of personality, and tremble with a convincing movement of life.

CHAPTER XIV

THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION

I

To exclude the living, as we must, in an estimate of the American contribution to the development we have been tracing, is especially unjust.  Yet the principle must be applied.  The injustice lies in the fact that an important part of the contribution falls on the hither side of 1870 and has to do with authors still active.  The modern realistic movement in English fiction has been affected to some degree by the work, has responded to the influence of the two Americans, Howells and James.  What has been accomplished during the last forty years has been largely under their leadership.  Mr. Howells, true to his own definition, has practised the more truthful handling of material in depicting chosen aspects of the native life.  Mr. James, becoming more interested in British types, has, after a great deal of analysis of his own countrymen, passed by the bridge of the international Novel to a complete absorption in transatlantic studies, making his peculiar application of the realistic formula to the inner life of the spirit:  a curious compound, a cosmopolitan Puritan, an urbane student