Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 1, 1894 - Miscellanies, Volume I

MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS
art of verse, an art of handicraft, and only compar-
able with the art of prose. For that heat and height
of sane emotion which we agree to call by the name
of poetry is but a libertine and vagrant quality ;
present, at times, in any art, more often absent from
them all ; too seldom present in the prose novel, too
frequently absent from the ode and epic. Fiction
is in the same case : it is no substantive art, but
an element which enters largely into all the arts
but architecture. Homer, Wordsworth, Phidias,
Hogarth, and Salvini, all deal in fiction ; and yet I
do not suppose that either Hogarth or Salvini, to
mention but these two, entered in any degree into
the scope of Mr. Besant's interesting lecture or Mr.
James's charming essay. The art of fiction, then,
regarded as a definition, is both too ample and too
scanty. Let me suggest another; let me suggest
that what both Mr. James and Mr. Besant had in
view was neither more nor less than the art of
narrative.
But Mr. Besant is anxious to speak solely of ' the
modern English novel,' the stay and bread-winner of
Mr. Mudie ; and in the author of the most pleasing
novel on that roll. All So7^ts and Conditions of Men,
the desire is natural enough. I can conceive then,
that he would hasten to propose two additions, and
read thus : the art oi fictitious narrative in prose.
Now the fact of the existence of the modern
English novel is not to be denied ; materially, with
its three volumes, leaded type, and gilded lettering,
it is easily distinguishable from other forms of litera-
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