He sets forth his theory of style in the essay called _A Humble Remonstrance_. It amounts to this: First, you shall have an idea, a controlling thought; then you shall set your words and sentences marching after it as soldiers follow their captain; and if any turns back, looks the other way, fails to keep step, you shall put him out of the ranks as a malingerer, a deserter at heart. “The proper method of literature,” says he, “is by selection, which is a kind of negative exaggeration.” But the positive exaggeration,—the forced epithet, the violent phrase, the hysterical paragraph,—he does not allow. Hence we feel at once a restraint and an intensity, a poignancy and a delicacy in his style, which make it vivid without ever becoming insane even when he describes insanity, as he does in _The Merry Men_, _Olalla_, and _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_. His words are focussed on the object as with a burning-glass. They light it up; they kindle it; but they do not distort it. Now a style like this may have its occasional fatigues: it may convey a sense of over-carefulness, of a choice somewhat too meticulous,—to use a word which in itself illustrates my meaning. But after all it has a certain charm, especially in these days of slipshod, straddling English. You like to see a man put his foot down in the right place, neither stumbling nor swaggering. The assurance with which he treads may be the result of forethought and concentration, but to you, reading, it gives a feeling of ease and confidence. You follow him with pleasure because he knows where he is going and has taken pains to study the best way of getting there. Take a couple of illustrations from the early sketches which Stevenson wrote to accompany a book of etchings of Edinburgh,—hack work, you may call them; but even hack work can be done with a nice conscience. Here is the Edinburgh climate: “The weather is raw and boisterous in winter, shifty and ungenial in summer, and a downright meteorological purgatory in spring. The delicate die early, and I, as a survivor among bleak winds and plumping rains, have been sometimes tempted to envy them their fate.” Here is the Scottish love of home: (One of the tall “lands,” inhabited by a hundred families, has crumbled and gone down.) “How many people all over the world, in London, Canada, New Zealand, could say with truth, ‘The house I was born in fell last night’!” Now turn to a volume of short stories. Here is a Hebridean night, in _The Merry Men_: “Outside was a wonderful clear night of stars, with here and there a cloud still hanging, last stragglers of the tempest. It was near the top of the flood, and the Merry Men were roaring in the windless quiet.”