He communicates to his confidant with the eagerness of a boy confabulating in holidays over a Christmas charade; but I remember no instance of his expressing a subject, as one may say, as a subject—hinting at what novelists mainly know, one would imagine, as the determinant thing in it, the idea out of which it springs. The form, the envelope, is there with him, headforemost, _as_ the idea; titles, names, that is, chapters, sequences, orders, while we are still asking ourselves how it was that he primarily put to his own mind what it was all to be about. He simply _felt_ this, evidently, and it is always the one dumb sound, the stopped pipe or only unexpressed thing, in all his contagious candour. He finds none the less in the letter to which I refer one of the problems of the wonderful projected “Sophia Scarlet” “exactly a Balzac one, and I wish I had his fist—for I have already a better method—the kinetic—whereas he continually allowed himself to be led into the static.” There we have him—Stevenson, not Balzac—at his most overflowing, and after all radiantly capable of conceiving at another moment that his “better method” would have been none at all for Balzac’s vision of a subject, least of all of _the_ subject, the whole of life. Balzac’s method was adapted to his notion of presentation—which we may accept, it strikes me, under the protection of what he presents. Were it not, in fine, as I may repeat, to embark in a bigger boat than would here turn round I might note further that Stevenson has elsewhere—was disposed in general to have—too short a way with this master. There is an interesting passage in which he charges him with having never known what to leave out, a passage which has its bearing on condition of being read with due remembrance of the class of performance to which “Le Colonel Chabert,” for instance, “Le Curé de Tours,” “L’Interdiction,” “La Messe de l’Athée” (to name but a few brief masterpieces in a long list) appertain.