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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Stevensoniana, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Stevensoniana
+       Being a Reprint of Various Literary and Pictorial Miscellany
+       Associated with Robert Louis Stevenson, the Man and His Work
+
+Author: Various
+
+Release Date: August 14, 2010 [EBook #33428]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STEVENSONIANA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Bryan Ness and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Stevensoniana
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Robert Louis Stevenson]
+
+
+
+
+  Stevensoniana
+
+
+  BEING A REPRINT OF
+  VARIOUS LITERARY AND
+  PICTORIAL MISCELLANY
+  ASSOCIATED WITH
+  ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
+  THE MAN AND HIS WORK
+
+
+  The Bankside Press
+  M. F. MANSFIELD, 14 WEST 22ND STREET, NEW YORK
+
+
+
+  Copyright
+  1900
+  M. F. Mansfield
+
+
+
+
+_Contents_
+
+
+  Biographical                                 3
+      Scotland
+      London
+      The Riviera
+      The Golden Gate
+      The South Seas
+
+  Apparition                                  16
+
+  Stevenson's First Book                      17
+
+  Books Which Have Influenced Me              19
+
+  A Stevenson Letter                          33
+
+  A Justification                             33
+
+  The Davos Platz Books                       40
+
+  Stevenson's Later Letters                   44
+
+  A Stevenson Shrine                          49
+
+  Stevenson and Hazlitt                       55
+
+  On Beranger                                 57
+
+  Stevenson of the Letters                    61
+
+  Apropos Vailima Letters                     62
+
+  A Visit to Stevenson's Pacific Isle         65
+
+  A Pen Portrait                              76
+
+  Appreciation and Homage                     78
+
+  R. L. S. and Music                          81
+
+
+
+
+_Illustrations_
+
+
+  Frontispiece Portrait. From Etching by Hollyer
+
+  Facsimile Title Page
+      Travels With a Donkey }                 17
+      An Inland Voyage      }                 17
+
+  Facsimile Title Page
+      Not I                 }                 40
+      Black Canyon          }                 40
+
+  Facsimile Title Page
+      A Pentland Rising                       49
+
+  Facsimile Title Page
+      A New Form of Intermittent Light        64
+
+
+
+
+_Stevensoniana_
+
+
+
+
+_By Way of Introduction_
+
+
+The early days of the literary career of Robert Louis Stevenson can hardly
+be said to have been entirely devoid of recognition, though it would
+appear doubtful if the world at large was willing to recognize his
+abilities had it not been for his wonderful personality; with a soul and
+an imagination far above those of his early associates he gradually drew
+around him the respect and admiration of that larger world of letters, the
+London coterie. The following biographical notes are to be considered then
+as a mere resume of the various chronological periods and stages of his
+career as is shown by the many facts which have already become the common
+property of the latter day reader, but which by reason of the scattered
+source of supply and the extreme unlikelyhood of their being included in
+any authoritative life or biography, makes them at once interesting and
+valuable.
+
+As sponsor for the abilities of Robert Louis Stevenson, stands first and
+foremost, the name of William Ernest Henley a belief which was latterly
+endorsed by most literary critics from Gladstone to LeGallienne.
+
+
+
+
+Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was born in Howard Place, Edinburgh, on the
+13th of November, 1850. From his eighteenth year he seldom, if ever,
+signed himself aught but Robert Louis Stevenson, omitting the name Balfour
+therefrom. From birth he was of a slight and excitable nature and suffered
+keenly from chronic and frequent illness. His recognized literary labors
+may be said to have commenced at the immature age of six when, it is
+recalled, he wrote, presumably for his own amusement and that of his
+immediate family, "A History of Moses," and some years later an account of
+his "Travels in Perth."
+
+In these early years there also took shape and form in his imagination
+what was afterwards given forth to the world in the pages of "Treasure
+Island."
+
+At eight, Stevenson was at school, and at eleven entered the Academy of
+his native city. Here he began his first real literary labors, publishing,
+editing and even writing and illustrating the contents of a small school
+periodical.
+
+Stevenson was emphatically a bird of passage, for regardless of the ties
+of kindred and sentiment he was ever on the wing, and when in after years
+as a seeker after health he proved none the less a careful observer than
+he had been in his schoolboy days, small wonder it is that he was able to
+give to the reading world such charming and novel descriptions of things
+seen.
+
+In his schooldays he journeyed far into the country round about, the
+inevitable outcome of which was for him to ultimately to write out in his
+own picturesque and imaginative words a record of his observations. From
+"Random Memories" we learn of his pleasure at having taken a journey in
+company with his father around among the lighthouses of the Scottish
+coast, "_the first in the complete character of a man, without the help of
+petticoats_." And with these excursions into Fife began his wanderings so
+charmingly and characteristically chronicled in his later letters and
+reminiscences.
+
+In 1862 he went abroad to Germany and Holland, and in the next year and in
+that following to Italy and the Riviera. In 1865 he wintered at Torquay,
+an English winter resort on the south coast.
+
+At seventeen, at Edinburgh University, Stevenson became a pupil of
+Fleeming Jenkin, Professor of Engineering, whose biography he wrote with
+much pride and devotion some years later.
+
+Thus it is seen from early childhood that Stevenson was constantly putting
+forth the product of his pen, in Verses, Essays, Plays, Parodies, and
+Tales. In the "Stevenson Medley," a privately issued volume published as a
+sort of supplement to the "Edinburgh Edition" of his writings are to be
+found reprints of various of his early efforts, including the famous
+pamphlet "The Pentland Rising," which, in its original form, is now
+considered as being perhaps the rarest of all "Stevensoniana."
+
+Quoting from a letter of Stevenson's to a friend, he says: "_I owned that
+I cared for nothing but literature; my father saying that that was no
+profession but that I might be called to the Bar, if I chose * * * * so
+at the age of twenty-one I began to study law._" Accordingly the next few
+years were spent with ardous reading of Blackstone and his contemporaries,
+and arriving at the age of twenty-five, in 1875, Stevenson passed the
+examinations and was formally called a few days thereafter. During his
+matriculation at the law schools Stevenson was all the while perfecting
+himself in the profession of his heart's choice.
+
+About this time he came to know Mr. Sidney Colvin and Mr. William Ernest
+Henley, the beginning as the world knows, of a life long friendship with
+both these gentlemen.
+
+Stevenson's first introduction to the reading world at large was on the
+occasion of an article which appeared in the _Portfolio_ for December,
+1873, with the signature L. S. Stoneven appended.
+
+Already Stevenson had begun to reap the benefit of acquaintanceship and
+association with the little coterie of literary folk whom he had fallen in
+with in London. For a time he sojourned in the artistic colony which had
+taken up its abode in the Forest of Fontainebleau, and has recorded its
+charms of life and association in the essay "Fontainebleau." He also came
+to know Bohemian Paris as well, and in certain circles which there exist,
+or did at one time exist, the memory of M. Stevenson still fondly lingers.
+Returning to Edinburgh Stevenson hung forth his placard at the now famous
+17 Heriot Row, which read Robert Louis Stevenson, Advocate. He did not,
+however, hang for long between the balance of Law and Literature, and it
+has been said, he never tried a case. Finally it was but apparent that he
+was so firmly wedded to literature that, needs must, he should devote
+himself to it and with the publication of "Virginibus Puerisque," he is
+truly said to have emerged from the threatening obscurity of his early
+struggles.
+
+"An Inland Voyage" has recorded Stevenson's travels in Belgium in 1876,
+and "Travels with a Donkey in The Cevennes," chronicles another wandering
+in search of the picturesque, undertaken at about the same time. It is
+doubtful if either volume proved financially profitable at first though
+they proved, in connection with the volume of essays before mentioned, the
+means of introducing the name and work of Robert Louis Stevenson to an
+ever widening circle of fame.
+
+During this period Stevenson was a frequent contributor to the London
+literary journals, and he had also rewritten an early production in the
+form of a play; this in collaboration with Mr. W. E. Henley, and had also
+contributed his notes on "Picturesque Edinburgh" to Hamerton's
+_Portfolio_.
+
+In 1879 Stevenson set sail for the new world taking ship as a mere
+emigrant, crossing the ocean as a steerage passenger and afterwards by
+emigrant train, across the American continent to the Golden Gate; a rude
+but romantic method of travel for one who had been nurtured in comfort and
+a chronic sufferer from ill health; a long journey though destined to be
+but the beginnings of a wandering after peace and health which latterly
+brought him to "Vailima" by the shore of that "ultimate island where now
+rest the remains of the beloved "Tusitala."
+
+The "Amateur Emigrant" did not at once meet with the success it deserved
+in the American literary arena, though no one will deny but that praise
+was afterward showered upon the author's work to the full. Eight months
+were spent in the immediate vicinity of the Golden Gate when he succumbed
+to a severe illness which proved a serious draft on his powers.
+
+In 1880, Stevenson, then in his thirty-first year, was married to Mrs.
+Osbourne, an American lady whom he had known in France, and with his
+step-son Lloyd Osbourne and Mrs. Stevenson took up his abode in an
+abandoned mining camp at Juan Silverado, situated in the mountains of the
+Coast range. The life here can be no more pleasantly referred to than by
+recalling the record which was given to the public in "Silverado
+Squatters." The family remained at Silverado through the summer from
+whence they all journeyed to the old home in North Britain. For his
+health's sake, Stevenson, accompanied by his household, then betook
+himself to the dry and invigorating atmosphere of Davos Platz in the high
+Alps; and here amid the sunshine and the clear air the family settled for
+a winter's stay; and here it was that Stevenson, in conjunction with his
+step-son, concocted those ingenious and unique booklets known to
+collectors as the "Davos Platz Brochures." They had set up a small press
+and derived much pleasure in designing and printing these little books;
+"Black Canyon," "Not I," and "Moral Emblems," all of which are now of such
+extreme rarity as to be almost unobtainable in their original state.
+
+In 1881 was begun the actual labor of writing "Treasure Island," the germ
+of which had been lying dormant in Stevenson's brain since his early
+schoolboy days. After another visit to Scotland, Stevenson set his
+footsteps still further to the southward and domiciled himself with his
+family at the Chalet la Solitude, near Hyeres near Marseilles, on the
+shores of the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, "Treasure Island" was running its
+course serially in the _Young Folks Paper_, and when it appeared as a
+volume pointed the definite way of Stevenson's popularity, the book being
+in every sense his first popular success.
+
+Realizing that his malady grew no better in the southland Stevenson
+settled at Bournemouth, a mild winter resort on the south coast of
+England. Here he occupied the house presented to him by his father, and
+which he named "Skerryvore" after the lighthouse off the coast of
+Scotland, designed and built by his uncle, Alan Stevenson. Stevenson
+continued his literary labours at this place unremittingly, though never
+at any one extended period was he really free from the dread grasp of his
+malady. Up to now writing had brought him but scant profit, and until his
+thirty-sixth year, says Mr. Colvin, his income had scarcely, if ever,
+exceeded three hundred pounds per year. His second great success was that
+weird tale of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," and thenceforth he came to know
+his value as a writer of ability, and felt definitely assured that his
+labors would return to him a satisfying income.
+
+In 1887, after the death of his father, Stevenson again went to America,
+sailing for New York in August of that year, and sojourning for short
+periods among and with friends in the East.
+
+In the spring of 1888, when in his thirty-eighth year, Stevenson
+accompanied by members of his family, accepted an offer to cruise among
+the islands of the South Seas and write the story of his voyagings in a
+series of letters to a syndicate of newspapers. Arrangements were made for
+the charter of the schooner Casco, Captain Otis, in which he set sail from
+San Francisco, early in the spring, bound ostensibly for the "Marquesas."
+The cruise covered six months. During the voyage northward the Stevensons
+stayed some months at Honolulu and while there a visit was paid to the
+leper settlement on the island of Molokai, which ultimately called forth
+the "open letter" to the Rev. Dr. Hyde of Honolulu, wherein that Reverend
+gentleman received an unmitigated scathing from Stevenson's incensed pen,
+an incident which is only too readily recalled for one to linger over it
+at this time.
+
+From Honolulu the cruise was continued southward for another six months on
+a trading schooner called the Equator which arrived at Apia, in Samoa,
+about Christmas time (1889). Here the company remained for some weeks, and
+here Stevenson purchased an estate of some hundreds of acres, lying on the
+mountainside overlooking the sea, which he called _Vailima_. The
+Stevensons went to Sidney, N. S. W. soon after, but again in the month of
+April steamed away in the trading steamer Janet Nicoll, visiting Auckland
+and the Penrhyn Islands, thence to the Ellis, Gilbert, and Marshall
+Islands and via New Caledonia, Sydney, and Auckland to Apia where they
+arrived again in the early autumn. They settled here upon their estate and
+the following spring Mrs. Stevenson, the elder, joined the household, as
+also Stevenson's step-daughter, Mrs. Strong; thus began the four remaining
+years of Stevenson's life, amid the ties of kith and kin surrounding him
+as he worked in his exile in a far away land.
+
+Amid these pleasant surroundings Stevenson pursued his constant and daily
+work, and rode about his island home entertaining the population, both
+native and European. He became actively interested in the political life
+of the islands, and when international complications came upon them in
+1891, he dignified the whole proceedings by his impartial letters to the
+_London Times_, and later by the publication of the "Footnote to History,"
+a monograph published in 1892.
+
+Meanwhile he was applying himself to his writing with ardous persistancy,
+and quoting his own words from a letter written in 1893, he was seriously
+overworked, "_I am overworked bitterly, and my hand is a thing that was,
+and in the meanwhile so are my brains._"
+
+In January of the same year he suffered from an attack of influenza from
+which he never fully recovered. While yet ill in bed he had begun to
+dictate "St. Ives" and "Weir of Hermiston."
+
+From the Dictionary of National Biography is taken the following
+description of the sad end. "On the afternoon of the Fourth of December he
+was talking gaily with his wife, when a sudden rupture of a blood-vessel
+in the brain laid him at her feet and within two hours all was over."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Out across the pearly Pacific on the lonely mountainside at Samoa, lies
+all that once was mortal of "_Tusitala, the Teller of Tales_."
+
+
+
+
+  _APPARITION._
+
+  _"Thin-legged, thin-chested, slight unspeakably,
+  Neat-footed and weak-fingered: in his face--
+  Lean, large-boned, curved of beak, and touched with race.
+  Bold-lipped, rich-tinted, mutable as the sea,
+  The brown eyes radiant with vivacity--
+  There shines a brilliant and romantic grace,
+  A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace
+  Of passion and impudence and energy.
+
+  Valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck,
+  Most vain, most generous, sternly critical,
+  Buffoon and poet, lover and sensualist:
+  A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck,
+  Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all,
+  And something of the Shorter-Catechist."_
+                                  (W. E. HENLEY)
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: FRONTISPIECE, BY WALTER CRANE, TO AN "INLAND VOYAGE."
+(FIRST EDITION.)]
+
+
+[Illustration: FRONTISPIECE, BY WALTER CRANE, TO "TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY."
+(FIRST EDITION.)]
+
+
+
+
+STEVENSON'S FIRST BOOK
+
+
+The publication of the Stevenson letters revived interest in his career,
+both as man and writer. His first published book, as our readers will
+remember, was "The Pentland Rising," a pamphlet of twenty pages issued in
+Edinburgh in the autumn of 1866, when the author was but sixteen. At the
+time of Stevenson's death copies of this little work were sold for upwards
+of L20 a piece, but the price afterwards fell considerably. In 1868, he
+wrote the "Charity Bazaar," a boyish skit, filling four pages quarto, and
+which was privately printed. His next appearance in print seems to have
+been in the pages of a college paper, the _Edinburgh University Magazine_,
+which he and three fellow-students edited, and which lived through four
+numbers only. These numbers were issued from January to April, 1871. He
+says:
+
+"A pair of little active brothers--Livingstone by name, great skippers on
+the foot, great rubbers of the hands, who kept a bookshop over against the
+University building--had been debauched to play the part of publishers."
+
+The first number was edited by all four associates, the second by
+Stevenson and James Walter Ferrier, the third by Stevenson alone, and of
+the last he says: "It has long been a solemn question who it was that
+edited the fourth," and then: "It would perhaps be still more difficult to
+say who read it. Poor yellow sheet, that looked so hopefully in the
+Livingstones' window! Poor, harmless paper, that might have gone to print
+a Shakespeare on, and was instead so clumsily defaced with nonsense! And,
+shall I say, Poor editors? I cannot pity myself, to whom it was all pure
+gain. It was no news to me, but only the wholesome confirmation of my
+judgment, when the magazine struggled into half-birth, and instantly
+sickened and subsided into night."
+
+Stevenson contributed six articles to the four numbers, one of which, "An
+Old Scotch Gardener," he revised and reprinted in "Memories and
+Portraits."
+
+It will be news to many people that Stevenson was awarded the silver of
+the Royal Scottish Society of Arts for a paper entitled "A Notice of a New
+Form of Intermittent Light for Lighthouses." This paper was printed
+separately from the Transactions of the Society in a thin pamphlet,
+consisting of five pages of text only, beside the title-leaf. It has the
+headlines, "Mr. R. L. Stevenson on a New Form of Intermittent Light for
+Lighthouses," and contains five illustrations in the text.--_Publishers'
+Circular._
+
+
+
+
+BOOKS WHICH HAVE INFLUENCED ME
+
+_By R. L. S._
+
+
+The Editor has somewhat insidiously laid a trap for his correspondents,
+the question put appearing at first so innocent, truly cutting so deep. It
+is not, indeed, until after some reconnaissance and review that the writer
+awakes to find himself engaged upon something in the nature of
+autobiography, or, perhaps worse, upon a chapter in the life of that
+little, beautiful brother whom we once all had, and whom we have all lost
+and mourned, the man we ought to have been, the man we hoped to be. But
+when word has been passed (even to an editor), it should, if possible, be
+kept; and if sometimes I am wise and say too little, and sometimes weak
+and say too much, the blame must lie at the door of the person who
+entrapped me.
+
+The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works
+of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must
+afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson, which
+he must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the
+lesson of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the
+acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, but with a
+singular change--that monstrous, consuming _ego_ of ours being, for the
+nonce, struck out. To be so, they must be reasonably true to the human
+comedy; and any work that is so serves the turn of instruction. But the
+course of our education is answered best by those poems and romances where
+we breathe a magnanimous atmosphere of thought and meet generous and pious
+characters. Shakespeare has served me best. Few living friends have had
+upon me an influence so strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. The last
+character, already well beloved in the reading, I had the good fortune to
+see, I must think, in an impressionable hour, played by Mrs. Scott
+Siddons. Nothing has ever more moved, more delighted, more refreshed me;
+nor has the influence quite passed away. The dying Lear had a great effect
+upon my mind, and was the burthen of my reflections for long, so
+profoundly, so touchingly generous did it appear in sense so overpowering
+in expression. Perhaps my dearest and best friend outside of Shakespeare
+is D'Artagnan--the elderly D'Artagnan of the "Vicomte de Bragelonne." I
+know not a more human soul, nor, in his way, a finer; I shall be very
+sorry for the man who is so much of a pedant in morals that he cannot
+learn from the Captain of Musketeers. Lastly, I must name the "Pilgrim's
+Progress," a book that breathes of every beautiful and valuable emotion.
+
+But of works of art little can be said; their influence is profound and
+silent, like the influence of nature; they mould by contact; we drink them
+up like water, and are bettered, yet know how. It is in books more
+specifically didactic that we can follow out the effect, and distinguish
+and weigh and compare. A book which has been very influential upon me fell
+early into my hands, and so may stand first, though I think its influence
+was only sensible later on, and perhaps still keeps growing, for it is a
+book not easily outlived; the "Essais" of Montaigne. That temperate and
+general picture of life is a great gift to place in the hands of persons
+of to-day; they will find in these smiling pages a magazine of heroism and
+wisdom, all of an antique strain; they will have their "linen decencies"
+and excited orthodoxies fluttered, and will (if they have any gift of
+reading) perceive that these have not been fluttered without some excuse
+and ground of reason; and (again if they have any gift of reading) they
+will end by seeing that this old gentleman was in a dozen ways a finer
+fellow, and held in a dozen ways a nobler view of life, than they or their
+contemporaries.
+
+The next book, in order of time, to influence me, was the New Testament,
+and in particular the Gospel according to St. Matthew. I believe it would
+startle and move any one if they could make a certain effort of
+imagination and read it freshly like a book, not droningly and dully like
+a portion of the Bible. Any one would then be able to see in it those
+truths which we are all courteously supposed to know and all modestly
+refrain from applying. But upon this subject it is perhaps better to be
+silent.
+
+I come next to Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," a book of singular service, a
+book which tumbled the world upside down for me, blew into space a
+thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion, and, having thus shaken
+my tabernacle of lies, set me back again upon a strong foundation of all
+the original and manly virtues. But it is, once more, only a book for
+those who have the gift of reading. I will be very frank--I believe it is
+so with all good books, except, perhaps, fiction. The average man lives,
+and must live, so wholly in convention, that gunpowder charges of the
+truth are more apt to discompose than to invigorate his creed. Either he
+cries out upon blasphemy and indecency, and crouches the closer round that
+little idol of part-truths and part-conveniences which is the contemporary
+deity, or he is convinced by what is new, forgets what is old, and becomes
+truly blasphemous and indecent himself. New truth is only useful to
+supplement the old; rough truth is only wanted to expand, not to destroy,
+our civil and often elegant conventions. He who cannot judge had better
+stick to fiction and the daily papers. There he will get little harm, and,
+in the first at least, some good.
+
+Close upon the back of my discovery of Whitman, I came under the influence
+of Herbert Spencer. No more persuasive rabbi exists, and few better. How
+much of his vast structure will bear the touch of time, how much is clay
+and how much brass, it were too curious to inquire. But his words, if dry,
+are always manly and honest; there dwells in his pages a spirit of highly
+abstract joy, plucked naked like an algebraic symbol, but still joyful;
+and the reader will find there a _caput-mortuum_ of piety, with little
+indeed of its loveliness, but with most of its essentials; and these two
+qualities make his a wholesome, as his intellectual vigour makes him a
+bracing, writer. I should be much of a hound if I lost my gratitude to
+Herbert Spencer.
+
+"Goethe's Life," by Lewes, had a great importance for me when it first
+fell into my hands--a strange instance of the partiality of man's good and
+man's evil. I know no one whom I less admire than Goethe; he seems a very
+epitome of the sins of genius, breaking open the doors of private life,
+and wantonly wounding friends, in that crowning offence of "Werther," and
+in his own character a mere pen-and-ink Napoleon, conscious of the rights
+and duties of superior talents as a Spanish inquisitor was conscious of
+the rights and duties of his office. And yet in his fine devotion to his
+art, in his honest and serviceable friendship for Schiller, what lessons
+are contained! Biography, usually so false to its office, does here for
+once perform for us some of the work of fiction, reminding us, that is, of
+the truly mingled tissue of man's nature, and how huge faults and shining
+virtues cohabit and persevere in the same character. History serves us
+well to this effect, but in the originals, not in the pages of the popular
+epitomiser, who is bound, by the very nature of his task, to make us feel
+the difference of epochs instead of the essential identity of man, and
+even in the originals only to those who can recognize their own human
+virtues and defects in strange forms, often inverted and under strange
+names, often interchanged. Martial is a poet of no good repute, and it
+gives a man new thoughts to read his works dispassionately, and find in
+this unseemly jester's serious passages the image of a kind, wise, and
+self-respecting gentleman. It is customary, I suppose, in reading Martial,
+to leave out these pleasant verses; I never heard of them, at least, until
+I found them for myself; and this partiality is one among a thousand
+things that help to build up our distorted and hysterical conception of
+the great Roman empire.
+
+This brings us by a natural transition to a very noble book--the
+"Meditations" of Marcus Aurelius. The dispassionate gravity, the noble
+forgetfulness of self, the tenderness of others, that are there expressed
+and were practised on so great a scale in the life of its writer, make
+this book; a book quite by itself. No one can read it and not be moved.
+Yet it scarcely or rarely appeals to the feeling--those very mobile, those
+not very trusty parts of man. Its address lies farther back: its lesson
+comes more deeply home; when you have read, you carry away with you a
+memory of the man himself; it is as though you had touched a royal hand,
+looked into brave eyes, and made a noble friend; there is another bond on
+you thenceforth, binding you to life and to the love of virtue.
+
+Wordsworth should perhaps come next. Every one has been influenced by
+Wordsworth, and it is hard to tell precisely how. A certain innocence, a
+rugged austerity of joy, a sight of the stars, "the silence that there is
+among the hills," something of the cold thrill of dawn, cling to his work
+and give it a particular address to what is best in us. I do not know that
+you learn a lesson; you need not--Mill did not--agree with any one of his
+beliefs; and yet the spell is cast. Such are the best teachers: a dogma
+learned is only a new error--the old one was perhaps as good; but a spirit
+communicated is a perpetual possession. These best teachers climb beyond
+teaching to the plane of art; it is themselves, and what is best in
+themselves, that they communicate.
+
+I should never forgive myself if I forgot "The Egoist." It is art, if you
+like, but it belongs purely to didactic art, and from all the novels I
+have read (and I have read thousands) stands in a place by itself. Here is
+a Nathan for the modern David. * * * "The Egoist" is a satire; so much
+must be allowed; but it is a satire of a singular quality, which tells you
+nothing of that obvious mote which is engaged from first to last with that
+invisible beam. It is yourself that is haunted down; these are your own
+faults that are dragged into the day and numbered, with lingering relish,
+with cruel cunning and precision. A young friend of Mr. Meredith's (as I
+have the story) came to him in an agony. "This is too bad of you," he
+cried. "Willoughby is me!" "No, my dear fellow," said the author, "he is
+all of us." I have read "The Egoist" five or six times myself, and I mean
+to read it again; for I am like the young friend of the anecdote--I think
+Willoughby an unmanly but a very serviceable exposure of myself.
+
+I suppose, when I am done, I shall find that I have forgotten much that
+was most influential, as I see already I have forgotten Thoreau, and
+Hazlitt, whose paper "On the Spirit of Obligations" was a turning point in
+my life, and Penn, whose little book of aphorisms had a brief but strong
+effect on me, and Mitford's "Tales of Old Japan," wherein I learned for
+the first time the proper attitude of any rational man to his country's
+laws--a secret found, and kept, in the Asiatic Islands. That I should
+commemorate all is more than I can hope, or the editor could ask. It will
+be more to the point, after have said so much upon improving books, to say
+a word or two about the improvable reader. The gift of reading, as I have
+called it, is not very common, nor very generally understood. It consists,
+first of all, in a vast intellectual endowment--a free grace, I find I
+must call it--by which a man rises to understand that he is not
+punctually right, nor those from whom he differs absolutely wrong. He may
+hold dogmas; he may hold them passionately; and he may know that others
+hold them but coldly, or hold them differently, or hold them not at all.
+Well, if he has the gift of reading, these others will be full of meat for
+him. They will see the other side of propositions and the other side of
+virtues. He need not change his dogma for that, but he may change his
+reading of that dogma, and he must supplement and correct his deductions
+from it. A human truth, which is always very much a lie, hides as much of
+life as it displays. It is men who hold another truth, or, as it seems to
+us, perhaps, a dangerous lie, who can extend our restricted field of
+knowledge, and rouse our drowsy consciences. Something that seems quite
+new, or that seems insolently false or very dangerous, is the test of a
+reader. If he tries to see what it means, what truth excuses it, he has
+the gift, and let him read. If he is merely hurt, or offended, or exclaims
+upon his author's folly, he had better take to the daily papers; he will
+never be a reader.
+
+And here, with the aptest illustrative force, after I have laid down my
+part-truth, I must step in with its opposite. For, after all, we are
+vessels of a very limited content. Not all men can read all books; it is
+only in a chosen few that any man will find his appointed food; and the
+fittest lessons are the most palatable, and make themselves welcome to the
+mind. A writer learns this early, and it is his chief support; he goes on
+unafraid, laying down the law; and he is sure at heart that most of what
+he says is demonstrably false, and much of a mingled strain, and some
+hurtful, and very little good for service; but he is sure besides that
+when his words fall into the hands of any genuine reader, they will be
+weighed and winnowed, and only that which suits will be assimilated; and
+when they fall into the hands of one who cannot intelligently read, they
+come there quite silent and inarticulate, falling upon deaf ears, and his
+secret is kept as if he had not written.
+
+
+
+
+A STEVENSON LETTER
+
+
+_Dear Madam_:--It is impossible to be more gracefully penitent: I give you
+leave to buy ----'s triple piracy in ---- the library; and this permission
+is withheld from all other living creatures, so that you alone will
+possess that publication without sin.
+
+  I am, dear madam,
+            Yours truly,
+       ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
+  March, 1887.
+
+
+
+
+A JUSTIFICATION
+
+
+Boston, June 5, 1900.--When Mr. Stevenson was at Saranac in the
+Adirondacks I sent him a short editorial on his Brownies that I had
+written for the Boston _Daily Advertiser_, and also a letter, saying that
+I owed him one dollar. I professed penitence for having bought a pirated
+copy of "Dr. Jekyll" for 25 cents, and promised to make good the deficit
+if I ever met him. He sent me the letter above.
+
+In May, eleven years later, Miss Louise Imogene Guiney invited me to meet
+her friend, Mrs. Virgil Williams, to be told--for print--the true story of
+the Stevenson marriage. I was unable to go to meet Mrs. Williams at the
+time appointed, but a day or two later she came by Miss Guiney's
+introduction to an editorial desk where I had been for eight years in the
+office of the Boston _Evening Transcript_, and gave me certain facts, from
+which the article below was written. It appeared in _The Transcript_, May
+18, 1898.
+
+MINNA CAROLINE SMITH.
+
+
+MRS. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
+
+Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson, who has been ill in New York, has recovered
+and has gone to England for an indefinite stay. It is, however, her
+purpose to make her home again ultimately in San Francisco. Her presence
+in England is necessary, as Mr. Sidney Colvin is now engaged in writing
+the "Life of Stevenson," and depends upon Mrs. Stevenson for aid in
+compilation, and in deciding what shall be said and what shall be left
+out. A great deal has been said about the Stevensons which might much
+better have been left unsaid, for the simple reason that it is not true.
+Like the old story of Phillips Brooks and the boy with the "Episcopalian
+Kittens," some of the truthless tales are harmless. Others are less
+innocuous than the imaginative yarns which are always likely to be current
+about any bright personality, any "shining mark," like Stevenson and his
+accomplished wife.
+
+Now that he is dead, and Mrs. Stevenson has gone to his native Britain, it
+is well to deny authoritatively the absurd story which has often been
+revived during the past twenty years that Mrs. Stevenson's first husband,
+Mr. Osbourne, gave her away in marriage on the day of her wedding to
+Robert Louis Stevenson, and that Stevenson afterwards fraternized with his
+predecessor. As a matter of fact, Stevenson never in his life even saw the
+father of Lloyd Osbourne, who was about fourteen years of age at the time
+of his mother's marriage to the famous Scot. The father of Stevenson, an
+old-time Presbyterian gentlemen, made Lloyd Osbourne his heir, thus wholly
+welcoming his beloved daughter-in-law in the family, where she and her
+children have found happiness and where they gave so much. It is advisedly
+said that the elder Stevenson made Lloyd Osbourne his heir, his property
+to be that of his son's step-child after the death of his son and that
+son's wife. It is well known that Stevenson's mother was with his family
+in Samoa, and this dignified and conservative lady also followed the
+custom of the country which the family followed, in homely phrase, "going
+bare-footed" at home. Pictures of Stevenson in his Samoa home, enjoying
+the freedom of this native fashion, have been common enough. This Samoan
+custom seemed simple and natural to any one who saw the Stevensons in
+Samoa going without shoes and stockings, quite as summer girls on the
+Massachusetts shore have gone about without gloves or hats during recent
+years, an unconventionality which would once have shocked thousands. The
+matter would not be worth mentioning, but a curious myth about Mrs.
+Stevenson has sprung from it. A paragraph has been floating through
+contemporaries in several cities of late, to the effect that Mrs.
+Stevenson went out to dine in London, when first introduced there by her
+husband, without shoes and stockings! This little yarn really denies
+itself on the face of it. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Stevenson's conformity
+to social customs has never been found insufficient wherever she has been.
+She is a woman of original talents and great adaptability of talent who,
+for many years, was the nurse, the "guide, philosopher and friend," as
+well as the beloved wife of the child of genius whose name she bears. She
+was studying art in Paris, where she had gone with her three children,
+when she first met Robert Louis Stevenson, who was among the artists and
+literary folk at Barbizon. She returned to America with her daughter and
+her son--one son had died while she was in France--and readily got a
+divorce from Mr. Osbourne. No word concerning the father of her children
+has ever been uttered for publication by Mrs. Stevenson, or ever will be.
+He married a second time and, after a while, left his wife and
+disappeared. He has since been seen in South Africa. It is here repeated
+that Robert Louis Stevenson never saw him. Mrs. Stevenson wished to delay
+her second marriage for a year, but Stevenson had travelled over land and
+sea to California, and was ill and homesick. So, by the advice of a close
+friend, the marriage was not long postponed. This friend was Mrs. Virgil
+Williams, wife of the well-known teacher of painting in San Francisco, the
+founder of that pioneer art school of the West, which, since Mr.
+Williams's death, was munificently endowed by Mr. Searles as the Hopkins
+Institute. Mrs. Williams went with the pair to the house of Dr. Scott, a
+Presbyterian minister of San Francisco, who married Mr. and Mrs.
+Stevenson. Nobody else was present at the private wedding, except Mrs.
+Scott, the wife of the minister. This divine made Stevenson a present of a
+religious book of his own writing to read on the journey to Scotland, and
+the whimsical fear of Stevenson that he might not read it all while
+crossing the continent and the Atlantic was characteristic. But if he felt
+that this was not sufficiently light reading for a steamer journey he
+appreciated the gift, and in return sent Dr. Scott a book on a like topic
+written by his father in Scotland.
+
+"People are very much like folks"; the fairy tales which are told about
+the famous are very likely to need large grains of salt in the taking. The
+simple truth about the Stevensons was that theirs was a peculiarly
+fortunate and happy marriage, and that if they lived in Bohemia it was "on
+the airy uplands" of that land, where freedom of personal action never
+meant wilful foolish eccentricity or lack of conformity to the canons of
+true courtesy and kindness.
+
+
+
+
+THE DAVOS PLATZ BOOKS
+
+
+Mr. Joseph Pennell has contributed to _The Studio_ an account of an
+unpublished chapter, which is delightful reading and reveals Stevenson to
+the world as an illustrator and wood engraver. With the people of Le
+Monastier, the lace-makers, Stevenson became a popular figure and was
+known for miles in the country. In the town every urchin seemed to know
+his name, "although no living creature could pronounce it." One group of
+lace-makers brought out a chair whenever he went by, and insisted on
+having a good gossip. They would have it that the English talked French,
+or patois, and "of all patois they declared that mine was the most
+preposterous and the most jocose in sound. At each new word there was a
+new explosion of laughter, and some of the younger ones were glad to rise
+from their chairs and stamp about the streets in ecstasy." In a notice of
+the article, a writer in _The London Chronicle_ says:
+
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  NOT I,
+  And Other POEMS,
+
+  _BY_
+  Robert Louis Stevenson,
+
+  Author of
+  _The Blue Scalper, Travels
+  with a Donkey, etc._
+  PRICE 8d.
+
+
+  BLACK CANYON
+  _or_
+  Wild Adventures in the
+  FAR WEST
+  A
+  Tale of Instruction and Amusement
+  for the Young.
+
+  _BY
+  SAMUEL OSBOURNE_
+
+  ILLUSTRATED.
+
+  _Printed by the Author._
+  Davos-Platz.]
+
+
+"There was a dear old lady of Monastier with whom he struck up an
+attachment. She passed judgment on his sketches and his heresy with a wry
+mouth and a twinkle of the eye that were eminently Scottish. 'She was
+never weary of sitting to me for her portrait, in her best cap and brigand
+hat, and with all her wrinkles tidily composed, and though she never
+failed to repudiate the result, she would always insist upon another
+trial. * * * "No, no," she would say, "that is not it. I am old, to be
+sure, but I am better looking than that. We must try again."
+
+"But the most characteristic work of Stevenson as illustrator is to be
+found in the quaint little woodcuts which adorned the volumes turned out
+by the press of Osbourne & Co. at Davos. With some very primitive type and
+a boundless capacity for frivoling, this 'company,' consisting of Mr. and
+Mrs. Stevenson and young Lloyd Osbourne, managed to while away the hours
+of the Swiss Winter in delightful fashion. As Mr. Pennell states in _The
+Studio_ these Davos editions are exceedingly hard to secure. The British
+Museum itself has only two copies, and there is no hint of their existence
+in any of the published works. One of these works was entitled 'Moral
+Emblems; a Collection of Cuts and Verses.'
+
+"There was also a second collection of 'Moral Emblems, an edition de luxe,
+in tall paper, extra fine, price tenpence, and a popular edition for the
+million, small paper, cuts slightly worn, a great bargain, eightpence.'
+Another of these volumes was entitled 'The Graver and the Pen,' of which
+the author asserted on the poster that it was 'a most strikingly
+illustrated little work, and the poetry so pleasing that when it is taken
+up to be read is finished before it is set down.' There were five
+full-page illustrations, eleven pages of poetry finely printed on superb
+paper, and the whole work offered a splendid chance for an energetic
+publisher. One of the moral emblems runs as follows:
+
+  "Industrious pirate! See him sweep
+  The lonely bosom of the deep,
+  And daily the horizon scan
+  From Hatteras or Matapan.
+  Be sure, before that pirate's old,
+  He will have made a pot of gold,
+  And will retire from all his labors
+  And be respected by his neighbors.
+  You also scan your life's horizon
+  For all that you can clap your eyes on.
+
+"Sometimes an unintentional effect was introduced into the woodcuts, as in
+the case of 'The Foolhardy Geographer.' We cannot tell the story, but the
+effect is thus described in a postscript:
+
+  "A blemish in the cut appears,
+  Alas! it cost both blood and tears.
+  The glancing graver swerved aside,
+  Fast flowed the artist's vital tide!
+  And now the apologetic bard
+  Demands indulgence for his pard."
+
+
+
+
+STEVENSON'S LATER LETTERS
+
+_London Bookman, Dec. 1899._
+
+
+Out of these noble volumes of Stevenson letters two things come to me of
+new, of which the first is the more important. Before and above all else
+these books (with their appendage, the Vailima Correspondence) are the
+record of as noble a friendship as I know of in letters. And perhaps, as
+following from this, we have here a Stevenson without shadows. Not even a
+full statue, but rather a medallion in low relief--as it were the St.
+Gaudens bust done into printer's ink.
+
+It is difficult to say precisely what one feels, with Mr. Colvin (and long
+may he be spared) still in the midst of us. And yet I cannot help putting
+it on record that what impresses me most in these volumes, wherein are so
+many things lovely and of good report, is the way in which, in order that
+one friend may shine like a city set on a hill, the other friend
+consistently retires himself into deepest shade. Yet all the same Mr.
+Colvin is ever on the spot. You can trace him on every page--emergent only
+when an explanation must be made, never saying a word too much, obviously
+in possession of all the facts, but desirous of no reward or fame or glory
+to himself if only Tusitala continue to shine the first among his peers.
+Truly there is a love not perhaps _sur_passing the love of women, but
+certainly _passing_ it, in that it is different in kind and degree.
+
+Obviously, however, Mr. Colvin often wounded with the faithful wounds of a
+friend, and sometimes in return he was blessed, and sometimes he was
+banned. But always the next letter made it all right.
+
+To those outside of his family and familiars Stevenson was always a
+charming and sometimes a regular correspondent. To myself, with no claim
+upon him save that of a certain instinctive mutual liking, he wrote with
+the utmost punctuality every two months from 1888 to the week of his
+death.
+
+It is the irony of fate that about thirty of these letters lie buried
+somewhere beneath, above, or behind an impenetrable barrier of 25,000
+books. In a certain great "flitting" conducted by village workmen these
+manuscripts disappeared, and have so far eluded all research. But at the
+next upturning of the Universe, I doubt not they will come to light and be
+available for Mr. Colvin's twentieth edition. It was a great grief to me
+that I had no more to contribute besides those few but precious documents
+which appear in their places in the second volume of "Letters to Family
+and Friends."
+
+Albeit, in spite of every such blank, here is such richness as has not
+been in any man's correspondence since Horace Walpole's--yet never, like
+his, acidly-based, never razor-edged, never, for all Stevenson's Edinburgh
+extraction, either west-endy or east-windy. Here in brief are two books,
+solid, sane, packed with wit and kindliness and filled full of the very
+height of living.
+
+Not all of Stevenson is here--it seems to me, not even the greater part of
+Stevenson. Considered from one point of view, there is more of the depths
+of the real Stevenson in a single chapter of Miss Eve Simpson's
+"Edinburgh Days," especially in the chapter entitled "Life at
+Twenty-five," than in any of these 750 fair pages. But with such a friend
+as Mr. Colvin this was inevitable. He has carried out that finest of the
+maxims of amity, "Censure your friend in private, praise him in public!"
+And, indeed, if ever man deserved to be praised it was Stevenson. So
+generous was he, so ready to be pleased with other men's matters, so hard
+to satisfy with his own, a child among children, a man among men, a king
+among princes. Yet, all the same, anything of the nature of a play stirred
+him to the shoe soles, down to that last tragic bowl of salad and bottle
+of old Burgundy on the night before he died. He was a fairy prince and a
+peasant boy in one, Aladdin with an old lamp under his arm always ready to
+be rubbed, while outside his window Jack's beanstalk went clambering
+heavenward a foot every five minutes.
+
+All the same, it gives one a heartache--even those of us who knew him
+least--to think that no more of these wide sheets close written and many
+times folded will ever come to us through the post. And what the want must
+be to those who knew him longer and better, to Mr. Colvin, Mr. Gosse, Mr.
+Henley, only they know.
+
+For myself, I am grateful for every word set down here. It is all sweet,
+and true, and gracious. The heaven seems kinder to the earth while we
+read, and in the new portrait Tusitala's large dark eyes gleam at us from
+beneath the penthouse of his brows with a gipsy-like and transitory
+suggestion.
+
+"The Sprite" some one called him. And it was a true word. For here he had
+no continuing city. Doubtless, though, he lightens some Farther Lands with
+his bright wit, and such ministering spirits as he may cross on his
+journeying are finding him good company. _Talofa, Tusitala_; do not go
+very far away! We too would follow you down the "Road of Loving Hearts."
+
+S. R. CROCKETT.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  THE PENTLAND RISING
+  A PAGE OF HISTORY
+  1666
+
+  'A cloud of witnesses ly here,
+  Who for Christ's interest did appear.'
+                    _Inscription on Battle-field at Rullion Green._
+
+  EDINBURGH
+  ANDREW ELLIOT, 17 PRINCES STREET
+  1866]
+
+
+
+
+A STEVENSON SHRINE
+
+_By Emily Soldene_
+
+
+In 1896 I strolled down Market Street, San Francisco, looking into the
+curio- and other shops under the Palace Hotel, when my attention was
+attracted by a crowd of people round one particular shop-window. Now, a
+crowd in San Francisco (except on political occasions) is an uncommon
+sight. Naturally, with the curiosity of my sex and the perseverance of the
+Anglo-Saxon, I took my place in the surging mass and patiently waited till
+the course of events, and the shoulders of my surroundings, brought me up
+close to the point of vantage. What came they out for to see? It was a
+bookseller's window. In the window was a shrine. "The Works and Portraits
+of Robert Louis Stevenson," proclaimed a placard all illuminated and
+embossed with red and purple and green and gold. In the centre of the
+display was an odd-looking document. This, then, was the loadstone--a
+letter of Stevenson's, in Stevenson's own handwriting. Many people stood
+and read, then turned away, sad and sorrowful-looking. "Poor fellow!" said
+one woman. "But he's all right now. I guess he's got more than he asked
+for." I stood, too, and read. Before I had finished, my eyes, unknowingly,
+were full of tears. This is the document. When you have read, you will not
+wonder at the tears.
+
+"I think now, this 5th or 6th of April, 1873, that I can see my future
+life. I think it will run stiller and stiller year by year, a very quiet,
+desultorily studious existence. If God only gives me tolerable health, I
+think now I shall be very happy: work and science calm the mind, and stop
+gnawing in the brain; and as I am glad to say that I do now recognise that
+I shall never be a great man, I may set myself peacefully on a smaller
+journey, not without hope of coming to the inn before nightfall.
+
+                          _O dass mein leben
+  Nach diesem ziel ein ewig wandeln sey!_"
+
+I walked on a block or so, and, after a few minutes, when I thought my
+voice was steady and under control, turned back, went into the book-store,
+and asked the young man in attendance, "Could I be allowed to take a copy
+of the letter in the window?" He told me it was not, as I thought, an
+original document, but the printed reproduction of a memorandum found
+among the dead Stevenson's papers. "Then," said I, "can I not have
+one--can I not buy one?" And the young man shook his head. "No; they are
+not for sale." "Oh, I am sorry!" said I. "I would have given anything for
+one." "Well," said he, in a grave voice, and with a grave smile, "they are
+not, indeed, for sale; but have been printed for a particular purpose, and
+one will be given to all lovers of Stevenson." He spoke in such a low,
+reverent, sympathetic tone that I _knew his_ eyes must be full, and so I
+would not look.
+
+Next day I went to see _Mr. Doxey_ himself, who is a Stevenson enthusiast,
+and has one window (the window of the crowd) devoted entirely to
+Stevenson. All his works, all his editions--including the Edinburgh
+Edition--are there; and he, with the greatest kindness, showed me the
+treasures he had collected. In the first place, the number of portraits
+was astonishing. Years and conditions and circumstances, all various and
+changing; but the face--the face always the same. The eyes, wonderful in
+their keenness, their interrogative, questioning, eager gaze; the looking
+out, always looking out, always asking, looking ahead, far away into some
+distant land not given to _les autres_ to perceive. That wonderful looking
+out was the first thing that impressed me when I met Mr. Stevenson in
+Sydney in '93. Unfortunately for us, he only stayed there a short time,
+would not visit, was very difficult of access, not at all well, and when
+he went seemed to disappear, not go. Mr. Doxey had pictures of him in
+every possible phase--in turn-down collar, in no collar at all; his hair
+long, short, and middling; in oils, in water-colour, in photos, in a
+smoking-cap and Imperial; with a moustache, without a moustache; young,
+youthful, dashing, Byronic; not so youthful, middle-aged; looking in
+_this_ like a modern Manfred; in _that_ like an epitome of the fashions,
+wearing a debonair demeanour and a _degage_ tie; as a boy, as a barrister;
+on horseback, in a boat. There was a portrait taken by Mrs. Stevenson in
+1885, and one lent by Virgil Williams; another, a water-colour, lent by
+Miss O'Hara; and a wonderful study of his wonderful hands. Then he was
+photographed in his home at Samoa, surrounded by his friends and his
+faithful, devoted band of young men, his Samoan followers; in the royal
+boat-house at Honolulu, seated side by side with his Majesty King
+Kalakaua; on board the _Casco_. Here, evidently anxious for a really good
+picture, he has taken off his hat, standing in the sun bareheaded. At a
+native banquet, surrounded by all the delicacies of the season, bowls of
+_kava_, _poi_, _palo-sami_, and much good company. Then the later ones at
+Vailima; in the clearing close to his house, in the verandah. Later
+still, writing in his bed. Coming to the "inn" he talks about in
+1873--coming so close, close, unexpectedly, but not unprepared--Robert
+Louis Stevenson has passed the veil. Not dead, but gone before, he lives
+in the hearts of all people. But not so palpably, so outwardly, so
+proudly, as in the hearts of these people of the Sunny Land, who, standing
+on the extreme verge of the Western world, shading their eyes from the
+shining glory, watch the sunshine go out through the Golden Gate, out on
+its way across the pearly Pacific to the lonely Mountain of Samoa where
+lies the body of the man "Tusitala," whose songs and lessons and stories
+fill the earth, and the souls of the people thereof.
+
+On the fly-leaf of the copy of "The Silverado Squatters," sent to "Virgil
+Williams and Dora Norton Williams," to whom it was dedicated, is the
+following poem in the handwriting of the author, written at Hyeres, where,
+as he says in his diary, he spent the happiest days of his life--
+
+  Here, from the forelands of the tideless sea,
+  Behold and take my offering unadorned.
+  In the Pacific air it sprang; it grew
+  Among the silence of the Alpine air;
+  In Scottish heather blossomed; and at last,
+  By that unshapen sapphire, in whose face
+  Spain, Italy, France, Algiers, and Tunis view
+  Their introverted mountains, came to fruit.
+  Back now, my booklet, on the diving ship,
+  And posting on the rails to home, return
+  Home, and the friends whose honouring name you bear.
+                                  --_The Sketch, Feb. 26, 1896_
+
+
+
+
+STEVENSON AND HAZLITT
+
+
+Of the many books which Robert Louis Stevenson planned and discussed with
+his friends in his correspondence there is none, perhaps, which would have
+been more valued than the biography of William Hazlitt. Whenever Stevenson
+refers to Hazlitt, whether in his essay on "Walking Tours" or in his
+letters, he makes one wish he would say more. This is what he writes to
+Mr. Hammerton:
+
+     _"I am in treaty with Bentley for a Life of Hazlitt; I hope it will
+     not fall through as I love the subject, and appear to have found a
+     publisher who loves it also. That, I think, makes things more
+     pleasant. You know I am a fervent Hazlittite; I mean regarding him as
+     the English writer who has had the scantiest justice. Besides which,
+     I am anxious to write biography; really, if I understand myself in
+     quest of profit, I think it must be good to live with another man
+     from birth to death. You have tried it, and know."_
+
+If the qualification of a biographer is to understand his subject,
+Stevenson may be said to have been well qualified to write on Hazlitt. Mr.
+Leslie Stephen has given us a fine critical estimate of Hazlitt the
+writer, and the late Mr. Ireland's prefatory memoir to his admirable
+selection from the Essays, with its enforced limitations, is an excellent
+piece of biographical condensation, but the life of the essayist has yet
+to be written. The subject has been tried by many others, but no one has
+quite captured the spirit of Hazlitt. Had the details of Hazlitt's life,
+with his passionate hates and loves, been told by himself in the manner of
+his beloved Rousseau, he might have produced a book which for interest
+would have rivalled the _Confessions_, but failing such a work one must
+deplore that Stevenson was not encouraged to write on the subject.
+
+_I. R., in London Academy._
+
+
+
+
+ON BERANGER
+
+_From the article by Robert Louis Stevenson in the Encyclopaedia
+Britannica._
+
+
+....He worked deliberately, never wrote more than fifteen songs a year and
+often less, and was so fastidious that he has not preserved a quarter of
+what he finished. "I am a good little bit of a poet," he says himself,
+"clever in the craft, and a conscientious worker, to whom old airs and a
+modest choice of subjects (_le coin ou je me suis confine_), have brought
+some success." Nevertheless, he makes a figure of importance in literary
+history. When he first began to cultivate the _chanson_, this minor form
+lay under some contempt, and was restricted to slight subjects and a
+humorous guise of treatment. Gradually he filled these little chiseled
+toys of verbal perfection with ever more and more sentiment. From a date
+comparatively early he had determined to sing for the people. It was for
+this reason that he fled, as far as possible, the houses of his
+influential friends, and came back gladly to the garret and the street
+corner. Thus it was, also, that he came to acknowledge obligations to
+Emile Debraux, who had often stood between him and the masses as
+interpreter, and given him the key-note of the popular humour. Now, he had
+observed in the songs of sailors, and all who labour, a prevailing tone of
+sadness; and so, as he grew more masterful in this sort of expression, he
+sought more and more after what is deep, serious, and constant in the
+thoughts of common men. The evolution was slow; and we can see in his own
+works examples of every stage, from that of witty indifference in fifty
+pieces of the first collection, to that of grave and even tragic feeling
+in _Les Souvenirs du Peuple_ or _Le Vieux Vagabond_. And this innovation
+involved another, which was as a sort of prelude to the great romantic
+movement. For the _chanson_, as he says himself, opened up to him a path
+in which his genius could develop itself at ease; he escaped, by this
+literary postern, from strict academical requirements, and had at his
+disposal the whole dictionary, four-fifths of which, according to La
+Harpe, were forbidden to the use of more regular and pretentious poetry.
+If he still kept some of the old vocabulary, some of the old imagery, he
+was yet accustoming people to hear moving subjects treated in a manner
+more free and simple than heretofore; so that his was a sort of
+conservative reform, preceding the violent revolution of Victor Hugo and
+his army of uncompromising romantics. He seems himself to have had
+glimmerings of some such idea; but he withheld his full approval from the
+new movement on two grounds:--first, because the romantic school misused
+somewhat brutally the delicate organism of the French language; and
+second, as he wrote to Sainte-Beuve in 1832, because they adopted the
+motto of "Art for art," and set no object of public usefulness before them
+as they wrote. For himself (and this is the third point of importance) he
+had a strong sense of political responsibility. Public interest took a far
+higher place in his estimation than any private passion or favour. He had
+little toleration for those erotic poets who sing their own loves and not
+the common sorrows of mankind, "who forget," to quote his own words,
+"forget beside their mistress those who labour before the Lord."...
+
+
+
+
+STEVENSON OF THE LETTERS.
+
+
+  Long, hatchet face, black hair, and haunting gaze,
+    That follows, as you move about the room,
+  Ah, this is he who trod the darkening ways,
+    And plucked the flowers upon the edge of doom.
+
+  The bright, sweet-scented flowers that star the road
+    To death's dim dwelling, others heed them not,
+  With sad eyes fixed upon that drear abode,
+    Weeping, and wailing their unhappy lot.
+
+  But he went laughing down the shadowed way,
+    The boy's heart leaping still within his breast,
+  Weaving his garlands when his mood was gay,
+    Mocking his sorrows with a solemn jest.
+
+  The high Gods gave him wine to drink; a cup
+    Of strong desire, of knowledge, and of pain,
+  He set it to his lips and drank it up,
+    Then smiling, turned unto his flowers again.
+
+  These are the flowers of that immortal strain,
+    Which, when the hand that plucked them drops and dies,
+  Still keep their radiant beauty free from stain,
+    And breathe their fragrance through the centuries.
+                                  B. PAUL NEWMAN.
+
+
+
+
+APROPOS VAILIMA LETTERS.
+
+
+The account of an interview with Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson, published in
+a San Francisco paper, is somewhat distressing reading. It raises over
+again the old question of the prudence of publishing a dead man's letters,
+when his widow is still alive, without her sanction. Mrs. Stevenson says
+that her late husband's friends--if such she still holds them to be--have
+hastened to make money out of the scraps and scrawls he sent them. The
+charge reads as an ugly one. But a moment's reflection supplies its
+modifications. Has Mr. Henley rushed into the market-place with his dead
+friend's letters? Has Mr. Charles Baxter? That was the old trio renowned
+in song and famous in fable. Of the newer friends--friends such as those
+he made in Bournemouth, Lady Shelley and the Misses Ashworth Taylor, the
+most attached a man ever had--not one has brought out of his or her
+treasury the delightful letters of "R. L. S." We have the Vailima
+Letters, it is true, but surely these must be published by the consent of
+Mrs. Stevenson and at her profit? We had also that letter which Mr. Gosse
+sent to the _Times_. And, as for that, it was, obviously given and not
+"sold"? In this particular letter, which was written in acknowledgment of
+a dedication of Mr. Gosse's poems to him, Stevenson congratulated his
+correspondent on the prospect of an old age mitigated by the society of
+his descendants. To heighten the picture, the man who had learned his
+craft so well, and could hardly elude it in his least-considered letters,
+introduced his own figure as a sort of foil--he was childless. That word,
+uttered with regret, has, perhaps, a pang which the heart of a widow might
+imagine she should be spared. Again, in one of the Vailima Letters,
+Stevenson refers to his having been happy only once in his life, and that,
+too, on the chance of its misinterpretation, may be ashes in Mrs.
+Stevenson's mouth. Yet who does not know "R. L. S." as a man of moods? He
+is that, and nothing else, in some of his letters. And no chance phrase
+of his will ever be read to the discredit of Mrs. Stevenson--she may take
+the English reader's oath on that.
+
+In one of his Vailima Letters Stevenson speaks of the "incredible" pains
+he has given to the first chapter of "Weir of Hermiston." Yet, after that
+even he remodelled it. It was worth the trouble, and the other seven and a
+bit are worthy of it. The very title was a serious trouble to him.
+"Braxfield" he would have liked it to be, but the judge of that name was
+not treated with enough historical care to warrant the adoption of it.
+Another name, "The Hanging Judge," he abandoned; also "The Lord Justice
+Clerk," also "The Two Kirsties of Cauldstaneship," and "The Four Black
+Brothers." No doubt in choosing "Weir of Hermiston"--with some of the
+sound-romance of Dobell's "Keiths of Revelston" about it--he chose finally
+for the best.--_The Sketch._
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  NOTICE
+  OF A
+  NEW FORM OF INTERMITTENT LIGHT
+  FOR LIGHTHOUSES.
+
+
+  BY
+  ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
+
+  _From the Transactions of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts,
+  Vol. VIII._, 1870-1871
+
+
+  EDINBURGH
+  PRINTED BY NEILL AND COMPANY
+  1871]
+
+
+
+
+A VISIT TO STEVENSON'S PACIFIC ISLE
+
+
+It is a curious fact that Stevenson, whom we all regarded at home as being
+the personification of Samoa--indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say
+that the average Englishman's idea of Samoa was "some island or other in
+the Pacific where Stevenson lives,"--has left very little behind him in
+the way of tradition or story in the island he loved so well. He lived in
+the midst of a society which, outside his immediate family surroundings,
+must have been eminently uncongenial to a man of his refined nature, yet
+he damaged his fame here, at least, by meddling in the petty squabbles
+which agitate the beach at Apia, and his "Footnote to History" has made
+him a host of enemies, notably among the German colony, who, by the mouth
+of one of their many prophets, condemned him to me as a writer of "stupid
+stinks!" And therefore he may have made a mistake in imagining himself a
+factor in the insoluble equation of Samoan affairs. It is to the natives
+that he was more attached than to the vague ideals which form their
+so-called political future. To them he was a great chief, "Tusitala
+Talmita" by name, and many a native I have spoken to mentioned him with
+real affection as a good friend and a man with a golden heart. Perhaps
+this is the praise he himself would have chosen rather than that of the
+white colony.
+
+It is not my purpose, however, to dilate on his life in Samoa, nor indeed
+would it be possible to gather, from the mass of conflicting evidence, any
+rational account of his doings in his island home. It is of a pilgrimage
+which I made to visit his library that I would give some short account.
+The room was walled from floor to ceiling with books, and I began to
+inspect them. To the left of the door were some "yellow backs," but few,
+nor did I see in his library much trash of any description. Next came
+books of travel in almost every country in the world, the bulk of them,
+however, dealing with the Pacific. From Capt. Cook down, it would be hard
+to name a Pacific travel book that has not found itself on the shelves at
+Vailima. Next, I am bound to say, came my first disappointment. I had
+always thought that Stevenson must have been a good classical scholar, and
+had an idea formed, I know not how or whence, that a great style--and
+surely his may be justly called so--necessitated a close and intimate
+acquaintance with those classical authors who--
+
+  "Upon the stretched forefinger of all Time
+  Sparkle forever."
+
+Yet I found classics, indeed, but, alas! in Mr. Bohn's edition, while on
+the shelf beneath lay the originals uncut. It came to me as a positive
+blow to find the pages of the "Odyssey" uncared for and unread, save in
+some translation. Of Horace he had many and good editions, and they seemed
+read and used; but of the Greek tragedians I found only "Sophocles" in
+Prof. Campbell's translation, and no edition of his plays save a small
+"OEdipus the King." This was a great shock to me, for even supposing
+that Stevenson was only "a maker of phrases" (as many people will tell
+you, above all here, "for a prophet is not without honor," etc.), still
+phrases must have some basis in education, and a man who is evidently
+careless of his masters of ancient language is not likely to prove a
+brilliant coiner of words.
+
+Turning with regret from this shelf, I came next upon a fine collection of
+French works, beginning with a complete edition of Balzac, which had
+evidently been read with care. Much French fiction was here--Daudet's
+"Tartarin," "Fromont Jeune et Risler Aine," "Les Rois en Exil," Guy de
+Maupassant, Prosper Merimee and a complete Victor Hugo, besides a swarm of
+the more ephemeral novels. Here, too, was a fine and complete edition of
+"Wellington's Dispatches" and several military treatises. Next to these
+came a good collection (be it always remembered that I speak of Samoa in
+Samoa, and 14,000 miles from the home of English and French publishing and
+printing) of historical works; Gibbon, of course, Milman, Von Ranke and
+many of the old French chroniclers--Philippe de Comines especially--read
+and marked, no doubt, when Stevenson was writing "The Black Arrow." One
+passage so marked struck me as curious. Surely Stevenson was a man whom,
+from his writings, one would imagine to be practically without enemies;
+yet, in the light of events at Apia, and from what I have heard here, the
+quotation seems apposite; "Je scay bien que ma lange m'a porte grande
+hommage, aussi m'a-t-elle fait quelques fois de plaisir beaucoup,
+toutesfois c'est raison que je repare l'amende." Now these are almost the
+exact words which conclude the preface to the only deplorable book
+Stevenson ever wrote--his "Footnote to History," which has made him many
+enemies, and, I think, no friends--in fact, nothing but the vigorous
+description of the hurricane saves it from worthlessness. As history it is
+not trustworthy, and as a footnote it was ridiculous. However, to return
+to the books. There was a very complete collection of modern poets, hardly
+any of note being omitted. I even saw a copy of "J. K. S.'s" "Lapsus
+Calami," which surprised me, for Stevenson was neither a Cambridge nor a
+public school man.
+
+Such, then, in brief, is a rough summary of the library of this remarkable
+man; many of the editions de luxe were packed away, but I believe what I
+saw was his working stock. We now opened a little glass door leading from
+the room into Stevenson's sanctum, where he dictated almost all his work.
+It was quite a small room, lighted by two windows; and in one corner lay a
+bed with a mat "Samoan fashion" spread thereon, while beside it was a
+table with a bunch of withered flowers (the last he ever looked on), and
+which Mr. Chatfield has very properly never permitted to be removed. Here,
+in one corner, stood a small bookcase with editions of his own works; the
+walls were hung with engravings of ancestors--the only sign of his Scotch
+origin I noted in the house--while above the chimney-piece (the only
+chimney-pieces and fire-places in Samoa are at Vailima), were a lovely
+series of drawings of Gordon Browne, to illustrate one of his later
+books, "The Island Nights' Adventures." These pictures, though only in
+black and white, breathe the spirit of the islands in a marvellous manner,
+especially remarkable being the illustration, "The Beach of Falesa." In a
+small bookcase over the head of the bed were some of his own books, a
+Shakespeare, and, what was more curious, "A Record of Remarkable Crimes
+and Criminals." I heard that Stevenson was fond of "supping full of
+horrors," and that would, of course, account for the inevitable murder or
+bloodshed which haunts his books; he was an avid reader of murders and
+crimes of all sorts. His mind was of a curious cast. Mr. Chatfield told me
+that on some days he was the most charming of companions--brilliant, witty
+and fascinating; on others, dull and morose beyond description, hardly
+uttering a word, and giving no sign of the wealth of tenderness and genial
+kindness that lurked within. As a host, it is agreed on all hands he was
+incomparable. His entertainment catered for the tastes of all, and in the
+sunshine of his delightful company all sorts and conditions of men were
+happy.
+
+We left this room with a feeling of depression, and passing through the
+other to the door, my eye fell on what I had not before noticed, the
+original of the delightful map which is the frontispiece to Treasure
+Island--a most beautiful piece of drawing, reminding me, in its quaint
+accompaniments of spouting dolphins and horn-blowing Tritons, as much as
+in its pretended accuracy, of those strange maps in the earlier editions
+of Gulliver, where Brobdingnag, Laputa, etc., are all laid out with
+geographical detail of latitude and longitude. The curious, sprawling
+writing of Flint and Billy Bones were in contrast to the fine workmanship
+of the rest of the map, which, save for some slight coarseness in the
+shading of the steeper side of "Spyglass Hill," might have been engraved.
+The last thing I saw in the library was perhaps the most curious of all.
+It was a navigating chart constructed by the natives of the Wallis
+Islands for their own use and guidance. I have since learned that such
+charts are used by the traders also who navigate these latitudes. The form
+of the charts is a parallelogram constructed on a framework of cane or
+other light wood. Across this parallelogram run vertically convex pieces
+of wood bent to show the general run or set of the wind and waves; cross
+currents are marked with cross pieces of wood showing their direction, and
+their force and variation are indicated on the slips of wood themselves
+(which are not half an inch wide) by means of signs and curious marks.
+Islands are denoted on this wonderful piece of native work by cowrie
+shells fastened to the framework. I suppose Stevenson must have picked
+this up on his travels among the islands, and I believe that although
+these charts are universally used in the Wallis group and are found
+perfectly correct, very few specimens of the kind have emerged as yet from
+those islands. I puzzled a long time to guess what it was, Mrs. Chatfield
+enjoying my mystification, which she herself had experienced when she
+first saw this remarkable map. One more fact I must mention about the
+library. In a corner I found a number of quarto volumes, well bound,
+containing apparently a continuous day-book of some of Stevenson's many
+voyages. It is to be hoped that these journals may some day be given to
+the world. Many and curious were the scenes he witnessed; various and
+entertaining the personages he must have met on his travels. He seems to
+have visited most of the many groups of islets with which the Pacific is
+so plentifully sprinkled.
+
+I did not care to visit the rest of the house, though my hostess most
+kindly offered to show me anything she could, but I stood outside and
+looked at the lofty hill over the house where he sleeps his last sleep in
+the land and among the people he loved so well. Samoans show much poetic
+feeling in selecting beautiful sites for the graves of their chiefs. In my
+journeys round the island, in the most remote districts, I was frequently
+delighted by coming suddenly upon the usual inclosure of rough stones
+which mark the resting-place of a chief, always in a beautiful spot and
+invariably commanding a wide and splendid view. This may also have been
+Stevenson's object in selecting the summit of the hill for his grave. The
+labor required to carry him to his last resting-place was immense, as many
+as sixty Samoans being employed, while only nineteen Europeans braved the
+difficulties of the ascent to be present at the sad offices. But his last
+home is beautiful; by day the trees innumerable round his lonely grave are
+musical with the fanfare of the glorious tradewinds, while at times the
+sound of
+
+  "The league-long roller thundering on the reef"
+
+is borne across the waving forest. The view by day is superb; mountain,
+valley, reef and palm, with the gleam of the sunlight on the breaking surf
+around the distant reef, while overhead the solitary tropic bird wings its
+silent flight through the dazzling azure of the skies. No more beautiful
+spot for a grave can be imagined; the majestic voice of those southern
+seas he loved so well makes melody in the very air around his grave. No
+spot more typical of the Pacific could have been found; and I turned away
+with a feeling of relief that one whose nature was so allied to that he
+wrote of should in his death not have been divided from the scenes he made
+familiar to so many thousands of admirers.
+
+
+
+
+A PEN PORTRAIT
+
+
+Robert Louis Stevenson, the author, really does look like the watermelon
+portrait of him in one of the magazines. He sat in a Long Branch car on
+Tuesday on his way from Manasquan to New York.
+
+He has a long, narrow face, and wears his long brown hair parted in the
+middle and combed back. It is just such straight, coarse hair as General
+Roger A. Pryor's, but much lighter in color. Stevenson sat in a forward
+corner of the car, with his hat off, and the cape of his coat up behind
+his head like a monk's cowl. His black velvet coat and vest showed
+plainly, and over his legs he wore a black and white checked shawl. His
+Byronic collar was soft and untidy, and his shirt was unlaundered, but his
+clothes were scrupulously clean. On the long, thin, white fingers of his
+left hand he wore two rings, and he kept these fingers busy constantly
+pulling his drooping moustache. His face is slightly freckled and a little
+hollow at the cheek, but it has a good bit of Scotch color in it.
+
+Mr. Stevenson presented such an odd figure that all in the car stared at
+him, particularly when a rumor of who he was ran among the people. But he
+seemed unconscious of the interest he aroused. He was reading a book, and
+every now and then he would fix a sentence in his mind, close the book on
+one finger, look at the ceiling and muse. When a sentence pleased him, he
+smiled at it, and then read it again. At the Jersey City depot he threw
+off his shawl and stood up, and then the figure he cut was extraordinary,
+for his coat proved to be merely a large cape, with a small one above it,
+and under both came his extra long legs, or, rather, his long lavender
+trousers, for they appeared to have no legs within them.
+
+Mrs. Stevenson was with him, but sat apart studying the scenery. Her
+husband looked at her frequently with a whimsical smile, and found great
+fun in laughing at her behind his book when a dude of tremendous style
+took the seat beside her.--_The Sun, 1887._
+
+
+
+
+APPRECIATION AND HOMAGE.
+
+
+"The precious memory of a single afternoon at the Saville Club.... We
+chiefly talked of the craft and the art of story-telling and of its
+technique.... Stevenson praised heartily Mark Twain's 'Huckleberry Finn,'
+and it was his belief that it was greater, riper, and richer than its
+forerunner, 'Tom Sawyer.'"
+
+...."He was a writer of travel sketches and was able to describe Edinburgh
+with the same freedom from the commonplace that gave freshness to
+'Silverado Squatters'.... He was also a biographer and a literary critic
+... but as a story-teller he won his widest triumphs."
+
+_Brander Matthews._
+
+
+"No other writer of our time has come as near as Stevenson to the conquest
+of a perfect English style. He is the one who stands first with the true
+lovers of the art of words. To quote from himself he is the one who is
+most unceasingly inspired by '_an unextinguishable zest in technical
+successes_' and has also most constantly remembered that '_The end of all
+art is to please_.'"
+
+_M. G. Van Rensselaer._
+
+
+"In the years I knew him, if Stevenson expressed much interest in
+children, it was mainly for the sake of their fathers and mothers: but
+that after a while he began to take a very great delight in summoning back
+to his clear recollection the panic fears and adventurous pleasure of his
+own early youth, thus becoming, in his portraiture of himself, the
+consummate painter of one species of child. But his relation to other
+children was shy and gently defiant; it would have exhausted him to play
+with them; but he looked forward to a time when they should be old enough
+to talk to him."
+
+_Edmund Gosse._
+
+
+
+
+R. L. S. AND MUSIC.
+
+
+Mr. Andrew Lang recently declared that most poets and literary men hate
+music. They hate it because it thrusts itself upon them when they don't
+want it--the poet when his eye is in a fine frenzy rolling, and the
+prosaic literary man when he is debating about the opening sentence of an
+important article. You need not look at pictures or statues, Mr. Lang
+contends; you need not even read poetry, if you "hate poetry and
+painting," like George II. But you must often listen to music whether you
+will or not. There is no escape from it any more than from the influenza.
+Mr. Lang no doubt speaks chiefly for himself. Nature, as he frankly
+admits, has not made him musical; and though he can stand "Will ye no come
+back again?" and "Bonnie Dundee," Wagner and Chopin say absolutely nothing
+to him. In any case, he is somewhat astray in declaring that literary men
+dislike music. Even Johnson, who is generally quoted as among the
+music-haters, and who, as we all know, called music "the least
+disagreeable of noises," even he was at the worst only insensible to the
+charms of the art. He once bought a flageolet--that he never made out a
+tune is no matter--and Burney, the musical historian, says that six months
+before his death he asked to be taught "at least the alphabet of your
+language." Scott, too, though the incurable defects of his voice and ear
+drove his music teacher to despair, was very partial to the national music
+of his country, and, like Congreve's Jeremy, had a "reasonable ear" for a
+jig. Nay, Lamb himself, whose lack of musical ear has been boldly
+proclaimed in one of the best of the Elia essays, used to go to Vincent
+Novello's house for no other purpose than to hear Novello play the organ
+and listen to his daughter's singing. These may, indeed, be taken as types
+of the indifferent men, the men who do not care very much whether they
+ever hear music or not. But look at the number of authors who have
+explicitly declared their delight in music. De Quincey was one; Browning
+was another. Did not Goldsmith play the flute, and Milton amuse himself
+with the organ? Rogers loved a barrel organ to distraction, and Ruskin
+went into mild raptures over Halle's playing of Thalberg's "Home, sweet
+home." Burns and Hogg scraped on the fiddle, and Shelley strummed on a
+guitar, now on the Bodleian at Oxford. Moore sang Irish songs, Tom
+Campbell once tipped a German organist to play for half an hour to him;
+and if Shakespeare wasn't musical he ought to have been considering the
+way in which he has spoken of the man who "hath no music in his soul." In
+short, in regard to music, our great writers have been just like other
+people--some have been passionately fond of music, some have liked it in a
+mild kind of way, and some have been absolutely indifferent to it.
+
+To which of the two first-mentioned classes our brave Stevenson belonged
+it would be somewhat difficult to say. That he was musical at all will
+probably be regarded as a revelation to most people; and indeed it is
+only since the recent publication of his correspondence that even the
+elect have realized the full extent of his musical tastes and
+accomplishments. That he took at least a mild interest in music might have
+been inferred from various allusions to the art in his tales and essays.
+In "The Wrong Box," for example, we have the humorous situation where the
+young barrister pretends that he is engaged on the composition of an
+imaginary comic opera. It is in the same story, again, that there occurs a
+veritable "locus classicus" on the art of playing the penny whistle, and
+the difference between the amateur and the professional performer.
+Stevenson, as we shall see, was himself devoted to the penny whistle, and
+in view of that devotion it is curious to remark the observation in this
+story that one seldom, if ever, encounters a person learning to play that
+instrument. "The young of the penny whistler," as he puts it, "like those
+of the salmon, are occult from observation." He endows David, his forbear
+at Pilrig, with a musical ear, for the Laird received David Balfour "in
+the midst of learned works and musical instruments, for he was not only a
+deep philosopher, but much of a musician."
+
+It is, however, needless to dwell upon these vague impersonal references
+to music when so much that is directly explicit on the subject is to be
+found both in the Vailima letters and in the latter correspondence. Miss
+Blantyre Simpson, who knew Stevenson in his early days, says that he had
+not much of a musical ear, and had only a "rudimentary acquaintance" with
+"Auld Lang Syne" and "The Wearing of the Green." It is clear that he
+improved as the years went on, but his family seem always to have regarded
+his musical accomplishments with something like scorn. In 1874, when he
+was 24, he was at Chester with his father, and the verger was taking the
+visitors round the cathedral.
+
+     "We got into a little side chapel, whence we could hear the choir
+     children at practice, and I stopped a moment listening to them with,
+     I dare-say, a very bright face, for the sound was delightful to me.
+     'Ah,' says he (the verger), 'You're very fond of music.' I said I
+     was. 'Yes, I could tell that by your head,' he answered. Then my
+     father cut in brutally, said anyway I had no ear, and left the verger
+     so distressed and shaken in the foundation of his creed that, I hear,
+     he got my father aside afterwards and said he was sure there was
+     something in my face, and wanted to know what it was if not music."
+
+The elder Stevenson very likely failed to distinguish between the love of
+music and the possession of an ear for music. The two things are totally
+different, as Coleridge once pointed out in regard to his own particular
+case. "I have," he said, "no ear whatever. I could not sing an air to save
+my life, but I have the intensest delight in music, and can detect good
+from bad." Stevenson probably had no such gift of discrimination, but that
+he had at least the faculty of musical appreciativeness seems perfectly
+clear. He mentions it as one of his characteristic failings that he never
+could remember the name of an air, no matter how familiar it was to him;
+but he was able to say of some engrossing pursuit that it "fascinates me
+like a tune." Wealth, he remarked once, evidently in all seriousness, is
+"useful for only two things--a yacht and a string quartette." In his
+younger days he seems to have been as much devoted to the opera as ever De
+Quincey was. At Frankfort, in 1872, he reports that he goes to the theatre
+every night, except when there is no opera. One night he was "terribly
+excited" over Halevy's "La Juive," so much so indeed that he had to
+"slope" in the middle of the fifth act. It was raining and cold outside,
+so he went into a "bierhalle" and brooded for nearly an hour over his
+glass. "An opera," he mused, "is far more real than real life to me. It
+seems as if stage illusion, and particularly this hardest to swallow and
+most conventional illusion of them all--an opera--would never stale upon
+me. I wish that life was an opera. I should like to live in one; but I
+don't know in what quarter of the globe I shall find a society so
+constituted. Besides, it would soon pall--imagine asking for three-kreuzer
+cigars in recitative, or giving the washerwoman the inventory of your
+dirty clothes in a sustained and flourishores aria!" Here, as some one has
+remarked, we see the wide-eyed innocence of the man--the tinsel and the
+humbug so apparent, and yet the vague longing so real.
+
+That Stevenson should make attempts to play the piano was only natural,
+but in that accomplishment he does not seem to have proceeded very far.
+When he was at Bournemouth in 1886, he tells Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin that "I
+write all the morning, come down, and never leave the piano till five;
+write letters, dine, get down again about eight, and never leave the piano
+until I go to bed." At this time the whistle was Osborne's instrument.
+"You should hear Lloyd on the penny whistle and me on the piano!"
+Stevenson exclaimed to his father, "Dear powers, what a concerto! I now
+live entirely for the piano; he for the whistle; the neighbors in a
+radius of a furlong and a half are packing up in quest of better climes."
+By his own confession, it was a case of picking out the melody with one
+finger! In the matter of musical arrangements he proclaims himself a
+purist, and yet, with charming inconsistency, announces that he is
+arranging certain numbers of the "Magic Flute" for "two melodious
+forefingers." Clearly, it does not say much for Mr. Henley's powers as a
+virtuoso that Stevenson should have "counterfeited his playing on the
+piano."
+
+But Stevenson's particular instrument was the flageolet, the same that
+Johnson once bought. Miss Simpson says that his flageolet-playing was
+merely one of his impulsive whims, an experiment undertaken to see if he
+liked making music. However this may have been, there can be no doubt
+about his assiduity in practice; indeed, the earlier Vailima letters are
+full of references which show his devotion to the now somewhat despised
+instrument. "Played on my pipe," "took to tootling on the flageolet," are
+entries which constantly occur, the context always making it clear that
+"pipe" is synonymous with flageolet. "If I take to my pipe," he writes on
+one occasion, "I know myself all is over for the morning." Writing to Mr.
+Colvin in June, 1891, he says:--"Tell Mrs. S. I have been playing 'Le
+Chant d'Amour' lately, and have arranged it, after awful trouble, rather
+prettily for two pipes; and it brought her before me with an effect scarce
+short of hallucination. I could hear her voice in every note; yet I had
+forgot the air entirely, and began to pipe it from notes as something new,
+when I was brought up with a round turn by this reminiscence." Generally
+speaking, Stevenson "tootled" by himself; but now and again he took part
+in concerted music with Osborne and Mrs. Strong. One day he makes music
+"furiously" with these two. A day or two later he writes:--"Woke at the
+usual time, very little work, for I was tired, and had a job for the
+evening--to write parts for a new instrument, a violin. Lunch, chat, and
+up to my place to practise; but there was no practising for me--my
+flageolet was gone wrong, and I had to take it all to pieces, clean it,
+and put it up again. As this is a most intricate job--the thing dissolves
+into seventeen separate members; most of these have to be fitted on their
+individual springs as fine as needles, and sometimes two at once with the
+springs shoving different ways--it took me till two." However, he got over
+his difficulty, and was ready for the performance. "In the evening our
+violinist arrived, no great virtuoso truly, but plucky, industrious, and a
+good reader; and we played five pieces with huge amusement, and broke up
+at nine." It goes without saying that, notwithstanding all this practice,
+Stevenson was exceedingly modest about his accomplishments. "Even my
+clumsinesses are my joy," he said--"my woodcuts, my stumbling on the
+pipe."
+
+But we must not forget the penny whistle. That instrument seems to have at
+one time quite ousted the flageolet. "I am a great performer before the
+Lord on the penny whistle," he writes to Miss Boodle from Saranac in
+1888. "We now perform duets on two D tin whistles; it is no joke to make
+the bass; I think I must really send you one, which I wish you would
+correct. I may be said to live for these instrumental labors now; but I
+have always some childishness on hand." To play a bass of any kind on a
+tin whistle must indeed have been "no joke." But the instrument appears to
+have had quite a fascination for Stevenson at this time. He even proposed
+to associate it with the title of what he ultimately called "A Child's
+Garden of Verses." When he sent the manuscript for publication he could
+not decide about the title, but after some banter on the subject he
+tentatively fixed on "The Penny Whistle: Nursery Verses, &c." Then he
+thought of a variation--"Penny Whistles for Small Whistlers," and directed
+that the title-page should be embellished with crossed penny whistles, or
+"a sheaf of 'em."
+
+But Stevenson was more than a player of music: he actually tried his hand
+at composition! In one letter of the year 1886 he sets down in musical
+notation from memory a part of a dance air of Lully's. About the harmony,
+which he has evidently made himself, he talks quite learnedly. "Where I
+have put an A," he says, "is that a dominant eleventh or what? or just a
+seventh on the D? and if the latter, is that allowed? It sounds very
+funny. Never mind all my questions; if I begin about music (which is my
+leading ignorance and curiosity) I have always to babble questions; all my
+friends know me now, and take no notice whatever." A few months later and
+he had composed his Opus 1. He called it a Threnody, and he sent it for
+criticism to his cousin, Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson, who was better versed in
+the art. Some plain talk on the part of the cousin apparently followed,
+for we find the composer urging certain points in self-justification.
+"There may be hidden fifths in it," he says, "and if there are it shows
+how damn spontaneous the thing was. I could tinker and tic-tac-toe on a
+piece of paper, but scorned the act with a Threnody which was poured forth
+like blood and water on the groaning organ." There was the true composer,
+putting down his inspiration as it came to him, and allowing it to stand
+as it was in defiance of all rule! Nothing daunted, he made another
+attempt. "Herewith another shy," he said, "more melancholy than before,
+but I think not so abjectly idiotic. The musical terms seem to be as good
+as in Beethoven, and that, after all, is the great affair. Bar the damn
+bareness of the base, it looks like a real piece of music from a distance.
+I am proud to say it was not made one hand at a time. The base was of
+synchronous birth with the treble; they are of the same age, and may God
+have mercy on their souls." That is too characteristically charming to be
+spoiled by comment.
+
+J. C. H.
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_.
+
+The following misprints have been corrected:
+  "authoratitive" corrected to "authoritative" (page 1)
+  "leggea" corrected to "legged" (page 16)
+  "aud" corrected to "and" (page 24)
+  "delighful" corrected to "delightful" (page 40)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Stevensoniana, by Various
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