Mark the high ideal he sets before him: “The Artist works entirely upon honour. The Public knows little or nothing of those merits in its quest of which you are condemned to spend the bulk of your endeavours. Merits of design, the merit of first-hand energy, the merit of a certain cheap accomplishment, which a man of the artistic temper easily acquires; these they can recognize, and these they value. But to those more exquisite refinements of proficiency and finish, which the Artist so ardently desires and so keenly feels, for which (in the vigorous words of Balzac) he must toil ‘like a miner buried in a landslip,’ for which day after day he recasts and revises and rejects, the gross mass of the Public must be ever blind. To those lost pains, suppose you attain the highest point of merit, posterity may possibly do justice; suppose, as is so probable, that you fail by even a hair’s breadth of the highest, rest certain they shall never be observed. Under the shadow of this cold thought alone in his studio the Artist must preserve from day to day his constancy to the ideal.” {124a} An exacting ideal, but one to which Stevenson was as faithful as a Calvinist to his theology. The question arises, however; is the fastidiousness, the patient care of the Artist, consistent with Vagabondage? Should one not say the greater the stylist, the lesser the Vagabond? This may be admitted. And thus it is that in the letters alone do we find the Vagabond temperament of Stevenson fully asserting itself. Elsewhere ’tis held in check. As Mr. Sidney Colvin justly says: {124b} “In his letters—excepting a few written in youth, and having more or less the character of exercises, and a few in after years which were intended for the public eye—Stevenson, the deliberate artist is scarcely forthcoming at all. He does not care a fig for order, or logical sequence, or congruity, or for striking a key of expression and keeping it, but becomes simply the most spontaneous and unstudied of human beings. He will write with the most distinguished eloquence on one day, with simple good sense and good feeling on a second, with flat triviality on another, and with the most slashing, often ultra-colloquial vehemency on a fourth, or will vary through all these moods, and more, in one and the same letter.”