As a whole, it is (of course) a fever dream of the most feverish. Over Bashville the footman I howled with derision and delight; I dote on Bashville--I could read of him for ever; _de Bashville je suis le fervent_--there is only one Bashville, and I am his devoted slave; _Bashville est magnifique, mais il n'est guere possible_. He is the note of the book. It is all mad, mad and deliriously delightful; the author has a taste in chivalry like Walter Scott's or Dumas', and then he daubs in little bits of socialism; he soars away on the wings of the romantic griffon--even the griffon, as he cleaves air, shouting with laughter at the nature of the quest--and I believe in his heart he thinks he is labouring in a quarry of solid granite realism. It is this that makes me--the most hardened adviser now extant--stand back and hold my peace. If Mr. Shaw is below five-and-twenty, let him go his path; if he is thirty, he had best be told that he is a romantic, and pursue romance with his eyes open;--or perhaps he knows it;--God knows!--my brain is softened. It is HORRID FUN. All I ask is more of it. Thank you for the pleasure you gave us, and tell me more of the inimitable author. (I say, Archer, my God, what women!)--Yours very truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. 1 part Charles Reade; 1 part Henry James or some kindred author badly assimilated; 1/2 part Disraeli (perhaps unconscious); 1-1/2 parts struggling, over-laid original talent; 1 part blooming, gaseous folly. That is the equation as it stands. What it may be, I don't know, nor any other man. _Vixere fortes_--O, let him remember that--let him beware of his damned century; his gifts of insane chivalry and animated narration are just those that might be slain and thrown out like an untimely birth by the Daemon of the epoch. And if he only knew how I have adored the chivalry! Bashville!--_O Bashville! j'en chortle_ (which is fairly polyglot). R. L. S. TO WILLIAM ARCHER [_Saranac Lake, February 1888._] MY DEAR ARCHER,--Pretty sick in bed; but necessary to protest and continue your education. Why was Jenkin an amateur in my eyes? You think because not amusing (I think he often was amusing). The reason is this: I never, or almost never, saw two pages of his work that I could not have put in one without the smallest loss of material. That is the only test I know of writing. If there is anywhere a thing said in two sentences that could have been as clearly and as engagingly and as forcibly said in one, then it's amateur work. Then you will bring me up with old Dumas. Nay, the object of a story is to be long, to fill up hours; the story-teller's art of writing is to water out by continual invention, historical and technical, and yet not seem to water; seem on the other hand to practise that same wit of conspicuous and declaratory condensation which is the proper art of writing. That is one thing in which my stories fail: I am always cutting the flesh off their bones.