They may be intensified by terror for the family
exchequer. The day passes in strenuous but futile effort, and the man
asks himself, "What will happen to me and mine if this kind of thing
continues?" Stevenson, we are allowed to say (for the letters tell
us), did torment himself with these terrors. And we may say further
that, by whatever causes impelled, he certainly worked too hard during
the last two years of his life. With regard to the passage quoted,
what seems to me really melancholy is not the baseless self-distrust,
for that is a transitory malady most incident to authorship; but that,
could a magic carpet have transported Stevenson at that moment to the
side of the friend he addressed--could he for an hour or two have
visited London--all this apprehension had been at once dispelled. He
left England before achieving his full conquest of the public heart,
and the extent of that conquest he, in his exile, never quite
realized. When he visited Sydney, early in 1893, it was to him a new
and disconcerting experience--but not, I fancy altogether
unpleasing--_digito monstrari_, or, as he puts it elsewhere, to "do
the affable celebrity life-sized." Nor do I think he quite realized
how large a place he filled in the education, as in the affections, of
the younger men--the Barries and Kiplings, the Weymans, Doyles and
Crocketts--whose courses began after he had left these shores.
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