that his every movement is being silently watched, is indeed 'the horrors come alive.'"—Walter Raleigh's Stevenson.
"In Treasure Island, then, Stevenson had at last got into the true path of his genius, and no critic can perceive this more clearly than he perceived it himself. Here for the first time his style ceased to bear the marks of artificiality, gaining enormously in vigor without losing anything of its subtle charm. Here for the first time he showed that he could treat the incidents of a story seriously—otherwise, that is to say, than as the squibs and fireworks of a pretty wit.
"Nothing could have been more fortunate than the circumstances under which Treasure Island was produced. It was meant for boys, and the hero, who speaks in the first person, is himself a boy. Now boys are singularly and even umreasonably intolerant of posturing or 'manner.' Without affectation themselves, they are satanically keen at detecting it in others. Even fitting cleverness, unless 'craftily qualified,' appears to them, in their sturdy barbarism, a highly suspicious trait, and verbal cleverness is downright unbearable. A wholesome control was thus exercised over the style of the romance.
"Again, the tale had to depend for its main interest on bare incident, and this requisite not only acted salutarily on the style, but kept down Stevenson's innate tendency to moralizing and to playing with character delineation. And, finally, no freakishness of incident was admissible. Verisimilitude is rigorously demanded by a boy—above all in such weighty concerns as pirates and hidden treasure. These subjects are not to be handled with levity; there must be no suspicion of a wink at the audience. All this Stevenson knew as well as anybody, for he comprehended a boy's nature thoroughly; indeed, in some things he never ceased to be a boy himself, albeit a boy 'with a graceful and somewhat fantastic bearing.' Besides, there was his dramatic sense—the instinct of putting himself in the place of his characters. There was also the presence of the elder Stevenson, who made the tale so real that he insisted on drawing up the inventory of Bones's estate in the sea-chest—a very salutary
