Professor Bliss Perry spoke in Sever 11 yesterday afternoon on "Robert Louis Stevenson."

"Gaudeum certaminis"--the joy of the struggle--were the words with which one of the friends of Stevenson used to sum up the spirit of the author's career. Throughout his life, Stevenson had constantly to fight--against sickness and the very near approach of death, but he was always ardent, joyous and invincibly courageous. Stevenson's artistic and literary ideas may not have been original, and may even be, as Mr. Chapman believes, too fragile and ephemeral to endure; but Stevenson's character was unique, and the remembrance and the influence of it will be enduring. "Sick and well I have had a splendid life," he wrote, not long before his death.

What were the qualities of mind and of literary art which made Stevenson the leader in the romantic revival? "I loved the art of words and the appearances of life," he once wrote, and in this sentence is contained the answer to the question. He was peculiarly a word artist, a writer of surpassing skill in rhetorical effect. He "loved the appearances of men"; he had a keen zest for romantic adventure, a keen curiosity concerning the lives and characters of men, and, above all, a sensitive appreciation of the romantic in scenery and history. The one weakness in his work arose from the way in which he learned to write. It was his habit to attempt to copy as best he could the striking passages in whatever he chanced to read, and, while this practice gave him a great command of diction, it also tended to destroy the individuality of his work. He played the "diligent ape" too long.

With this tendency toward romanticism, Stevenson naturally chose story writing as the first sphere of his literary activity. In his succeeding books Stevenson sounded a more serious note. "It begins to seem to me to be a man's business to leave off his damnable faces and to say his say," he quoted, in one of his letters. He began to turn from romance to reality.