  One evening Edward King and I were dining in the Champs ElysÉes when he said: "There is a new coon--a literary coon--come to town. He is a Scotchman and his name is Robert Louis Stevenson." Then he told me of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. At that moment the subject of our talk was living in a kind of self-imposed penury not half a mile away. Had we known this we could have ended the poor fellow's struggle with his pride and ambition then and there; have put him in the way of sure work and plenty of it; perhaps have lengthened, certainly have sweetened, his days, unless it be true that he was one of the impossibles, as he may easily be conceived to have been from reading his wayward biography and voluminous correspondence. To a young Kentuckian, one of "my boys," was given the opportunity to see the last of him and to bury him in far-away Samoa, whither he had taken himself for the final adventure and where he died, having attained some measure of the dreams he had cherished, and, let us hope, happy in the consciousness of the achievement. I rather think Stevenson should be placed at the head of the latter-day fictionists. But fashions in literature as in dress are ever changing. Washington Irving was the first of our men of letters to obtain foreign recognition. While the fires of hate between Great Britain and America were still burning he wrote kindly and elegantly of England and the English, and was accepted on both sides of the ocean. Taking his style from Addison and Goldsmith, he emulated their charity and humor; he went to Spain and in the same deft way he pictured the then unknown byways of the land of dreams; and coming home again he peopled the region of the Hudson with the beings of legend and fancy which are dear to us. He became our national man of letters. He stood quite at the head of our literature, giving the lie to the scornful query, "Who reads an American book?" As a pioneer he will always be considered; as a simple and vivid writer of things familiar and entertaining he will probably always be read; but as an originator literary history will hardly place him very high. There Bret Harte surely led him. The Tales of the Argonauts as works of creative fancy exceed the Sketches of Washington Irving alike in wealth of color and humor, in pathos and dramatic action. Some writers make an exception of the famous Sleepy Hollow story. But they have in mind the Rip Van Winkle of Jefferson and Boucicault, not the rather attenuated story of Irving, which--as far as the twenty years of sleep went--was borrowed from an old German legend. Mark Twain and Bret Harte, however, will always be bracketed with Washington Irving. Of the three I incline to the opinion that Mark Twain did the broadest and strongest work. His imagination had wider reach than Irving's. There is nowhere, as there is in Harte, the suspicion either of insincerity or of artificiality. Irving's humor was the humor of Sir Roger de Coverley and the Vicar of Wakefield. It is old English. Mark Twain's is his own--American through and through to the bone. I am not unmindful of Cooper and Hawthorne, of Longfellow, of Lowell and of Poe, but speak of Irving as the pioneer American man of letters, and of Mark Twain and Bret Harte as American literature's most conspicuous and original modern examples. Chapter the Twenty-Seventh
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