The  acquaintance  thus  begun  quickly  ripened  into  a  friendship
that  endured  to  the  end,  though  mountains  divided  and  '  the  waste
of  seas.'  Stevenson  was  indeed  a  '  true-blue  Meredith  man,'  as  we
have  ample  proof  in  his  letters,  and  also  in  his  essay  on  '  Books
which  have  influenced  me. '  There  was  nothing  in  literature  he
thought  to  be  beyond  the  range  of  his  master.  In  the  '  Vailima
Letters,'  for  instance,  we  find  him  writing  in  this  strain  about  the
difficulty  of  dealing  in  any  unhackneyed  and  dignified  way  with  love
in  fiction  :

The  difficulty  in  a  love  yarn  which  dwells  at  all  on  love  is  the
dwelling  on  one  string;  it  is  manifold,  I  grant,  but  the  root  fact
is   there   unchanged,    and    the    sentiment    being    very    intense,    and


112  GEORGE    MEREDITH

already  very  much  handled  in  letters,  positively  calls  for  a  little
pawing  and  gracing.  With  a  writer  of  my  prosaic  literalness  and
pertinacity  of  point  of  view,  this  all  shoves  toward  grossness — posi-
tively even  towards  the  far  more  damnable  closeness.  This  has
kept  me  off  the  sentiment  hitherto,  and  now  I  am  to  try  :  Lord  !  Of
course,  Meredith  can  do  it,  and  so  could  Shakespeare.
