Too close imitation of the masters has its dangers for the novice. Apes and peacocks beset the way. Stevenson's prose style is highly synthesised and a mosaic of dead men's manner. He has no esoteric message beyond the expression of his sprite-like, whimsical personality, and this expression is, in the main, consummate. The lion in his pathway is the thinness of his intellectual processes; as in De Quincey's case, a master of the English language beyond compare, who in the region of pure speculation often goes sadly limping; his criticism of Kant proves it. But a music-maker in our written speech, Robert Louis Stevenson is the supreme mocking-bird in English literature. He overplayed the sedulous imitator. John Jay Chapman in a brilliant essay has traced the progress of this prose pilgrim, a professional stylist as well as a professional invalid. The American critic registers the variations in style and sensibility of the Scotsman, who did not always demonstrate in his writing the fundamental idea that the sole exponent of sensibility is analytic power. He drew freely on all his predecessors, and his personal charm exhibits the "glue of unanimity," as old Boëthius would say. Mr. Chapman quotes a passage supposedly from Sir Thomas Browne, beginning, "Time sadly overcometh all things," which is not to be found in his collected writings. Yet it is apropos because, like Stevenson's prose, it is from the crucible of an alchemist, though at the time Mr. Chapman quoted it was not known to be a clever Liverpudlian forgery. Since then, after considerable controversy, the paragraph in question has been shown as the fabrication of a Liverpool man of letters, whose name we have forgotten. But it suggests, does this false Browne, that good prose may be successfully simulated, though essentials be missing.
If style cannot be imparted, what, then, is the next best thing to do, after a close study of the masters? We should say, go in a chastened mood to the nearest newspaper office and apply for a humble position on its staff. Then one will come to grips with life, the pacemaker of style. There is a lot of pompous advice emitted by the college professor--the Eternal Sophomore--about fleeing "journalese"; whereas it is in the daily press, whether New York, Paris, Vienna, or London, that one may find the soundest, most succinct prose, prose stripped of superfluous ornament, prose bare to the bone, and in fighting trim. But not elevated prose, "numerous" prose, as Quintilian hath it. For the supreme harmony of English prose we must go to the Bible (the Authorised, not the Revised, the latter manufactured by "the persons called revisers," as George Saintsbury bluntly describes them); to Shakespeare, Jeremy Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne, Walter Raleigh, Milton, De Quincey, Ruskin, Swinburne, Cardinal Newman, Pater, and Arthur Symons. And not forgetting the sweet intimacy of Charles Lamb, the sly charm of Max Beerbohm, or the harmonious and imaginative prose of W. H. Hudson, whose Green Mansions recalls the Châteaubriand of Atala, without its hateful note of morbid egotism.