Dominic Green’s essay—technically a review, but it’s written and best read as an essay—on Robert Louis Stevenson is one of the best things I’ve read in a while. See, e.g., this paragraph:

The fight, Graham Greene noted, is related without similes, metaphors, or adjectives—only the “sound of blows and someone crying out as if hurt,” David’s cry “That’s him that killed the boy!,” and the implied sound as David sees Alan “pass his sword through the mate’s body.” The kinesis of sound and motion recurs as, back on land and pursued by redcoats, David and Alan run across a rocky valley: The “afternoon was now fallen so breathless that the rolling of a pebble sounded abroad like a pistol shot, and would start the echo calling among the hills and cliffs.” Here the single adjective “breathless” doubles as both a description of the still air and a transferred epithet, implying the panting of the fugitives. The landscape is not seen, but heard in the echo of a rolling pebble.

Also, here is Stevenson responding to Henry James' critique of the lack of “visibility” in his fiction:

Tis true, and unless I make the greater effort—and am, as a step to that, convinced of its necessity—it will be more true I fear in the future. I hear people talking, and I feel them acting, and that seems to me to be fiction. My two aims may be described as—

1st. War to the adjective.

2nd. Death to the optic nerve.

Perfect.