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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Robert Louis Stevenson, by Alexander H. Japp
+
+
+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: Robert Louis Stevenson
+       a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial
+
+
+Author: Alexander H. Japp
+
+
+
+Release Date: May 5, 2007  [eBook #590]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON***
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the Charles Scribner's Sons 1905 edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+
+
+
+
+ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
+A RECORD, AN ESTIMATE, AND A MEMORIAL
+
+
+BY ALEXANDER H. JAPP, LL.D., F.R.S.E
+
+AUTHOR OF "THOREAU: HIS LIFE AND AIMS"; "MEMOIR OF THOMAS DE QUINCEY";
+"DE QUINCEY MEMORIALS," ETC., ETC.
+
+WITH HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED LETTERS FROM R. L. STEVENSON IN FACSIMILIE . .
+.
+
+SECOND EDITION
+
+NEW YORK
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+153-157 FIFTH AVENUE
+1905
+
+_Printed in Great Britain_.
+
+{Robert Louis Stevenson, from a sketch in oils by Sir William B.
+Richmond, K.G.B., R.A.: p0.jpg}
+
+Dedicated to
+C. A. LICHTENBERG, ESQ.
+AND
+Mrs LICHTENBERG,
+OF VILLA MARGHERITA, TREVISO,
+WITH MOST GRATEFUL REGARDS,
+
+ALEXANDER H. JAPP.
+
+19_th_ _December_ 1904.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+A few words may here be allowed me to explain one or two points.  First,
+about the facsimile of last page of Preface to _Familiar Studies of Men
+and Books_.  Stevenson was in Davos when the greater portion of that work
+went through the press.  He felt so much the disadvantage of being there
+in the circumstances (both himself and his wife ill) that he begged me to
+read the proofs of the Preface for him.  This illness has record in the
+letter from him (pp. 28-29).  The printers, of course, had directions to
+send the copy and proofs of the Preface to me.  Hence I am able now to
+give this facsimile.
+
+With regard to the letter at p. 19, of which facsimile is also given,
+what Stevenson there meant is not the "three last" of that batch, but the
+three last sent to me before--though that was an error on his part--he
+only then sent two chapters, making the "eleven chapters now"--sent to me
+by post.
+
+Another point on which I might have dwelt and illustrated by many
+instances is this, that though Stevenson was fond of hob-nobbing with all
+sorts and conditions of men, this desire of wide contact and intercourse
+has little show in his novels--the ordinary fibre of commonplace human
+beings not receiving much celebration from him there; another case in
+which his private bent and sympathies received little illustration in his
+novels.  But the fact lies implicit in much I have written.
+
+I have to thank many authors for permission to quote extracts I have
+used.
+
+ALEXANDER H. JAPP.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+I.      INTRODUCTION AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS
+II.     _TREASURE ISLAND_ AND SOME REMINISCENCES
+III.    THE CHILD FATHER OF THE MAN
+IV.     HEREDITY ILLUSTRATED
+V.      TRAVELS
+VI.     SOME EARLIER LETTERS
+VII.    THE VAILIMA LETTERS
+VIII.   WORK OF LATER YEARS
+IX.     SOME CHARACTERISTICS
+X.      A SAMOAN MEMORIAL OF R. L. STEVENSON
+XI.     MISS STUBBS' RECORD OF A PILGRIMAGE
+XII.    HIS GENIUS AND METHODS
+XIII.   PREACHER AND MYSTIC FABULIST
+XIV.    STEVENSON AS DRAMATIST
+XV.     THEORY OF GOOD AND EVIL
+XVI.    STEVENSON'S GLOOM
+XVII.   PROOFS OF GROWTH
+XVIII.  EARLIER DETERMINATIONS AND RESULTS
+XIX.    MR EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN'S ESTIMATE
+XX.     EGOTISTIC ELEMENT AND ITS EFFECTS
+XXI.    UNITY IN STEVENSON'S STORIES
+XXII.   PERSONAL CHEERFULNESS AND INVENTED GLOOM
+XXIII.  EDINBURGH REVIEWERS' DICTA INAPPLICABLE TO LATER WORK
+XXIV.   MR HENLEY'S SPITEFUL PERVERSIONS
+XXV.    MR CHRISTIE MURRAY'S IMPRESSIONS
+XXVI.   HERO-VILLAINS
+XXVII.  MR G. MOORE, MR MARRIOTT WATSON, AND OTHERS
+XXVIII. UNEXPECTED COMBINATIONS
+XXIX.   LOVE OF VAGABONDS
+XXX.    LORD ROSEBERY'S CASE
+XXXI.   MR GOSSE AND MS. OF _TREASURE ISLAND_
+XXXII.  STEVENSON PORTRAITS
+XXXIII. LAPSES AND ERRORS IN CRITICISM
+XXXIV.  LETTERS AND POEMS IN TESTIMONY
+APPENDIX
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--INTRODUCTION AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS
+
+
+My little effort to make Thoreau better known in England had one result
+that I am pleased to think of.  It brought me into personal association
+with R. L. Stevenson, who had written and published in _The Cornhill
+Magazine_ an essay on Thoreau, in whom he had for some time taken an
+interest.  He found in Thoreau not only a rare character for originality,
+courage, and indefatigable independence, but also a master of style, to
+whom, on this account, as much as any, he was inclined to play the part
+of the "sedulous ape," as he had acknowledged doing to many others--a
+later exercise, perhaps in some ways as fruitful as any that had gone
+before.  A recent poet, having had some seeds of plants sent to him from
+Northern Scotland to the South, celebrated his setting of them beside
+those native to the Surrey slope on which he dwelt, with the lines--
+
+   "And when the Northern seeds are growing,
+   Another beauty then bestowing,
+   We shall be fine, and North to South
+   Be giving kisses, mouth to mouth."
+
+So the Thoreau influence on Stevenson was as if a tart American
+wild-apple had been grafted on an English pippin, and produced a wholly
+new kind with the flavours of both; and here wild America and England
+kissed each other mouth to mouth.
+
+The direct result was the essay in _The Cornhill_, but the indirect
+results were many and less easily assessed, as Stevenson himself, as we
+shall see, was ever ready to admit.  The essay on Thoreau was written in
+America, which further, perhaps, bears out my point.
+
+One of the authorities, quoted by Mr Hammerton, in _Stevensoniana_ says
+of the circumstances in which he found our author, when he was busily
+engaged on that bit of work:
+
+   "I have visited him in a lonely lodging in California, it was previous
+   to his happy marriage, and found him submerged in billows of
+   bed-clothes; about him floated the scattered volumes of a complete set
+   of Thoreau; he was preparing an essay on that worthy, and he looked at
+   the moment like a half-drowned man, yet he was not cast down.  His
+   work, an endless task, was better than a straw to him.  It was to
+   become his life-preserver and to prolong his years.  I feel convinced
+   that without it he must have surrendered long since.  I found
+   Stevenson a man of the frailest physique, though most unaccountably
+   tenacious of life; a man whose pen was indefatigable, whose brain was
+   never at rest, who, as far as I am able to judge, looked upon
+   everybody and everything from a supremely intellectual point of view."
+   {1}
+
+We remember the common belief in Yorkshire and other parts that a man
+could not die so long as he could stand up--a belief on which poor
+Branwell Bronte was fain to act and to illustrate, but R. L. Stevenson
+illustrated it, as this writer shows, in a better, calmer, and healthier
+way, despite his lack of health.
+
+On some little points of fact, however, Stevenson was wrong; and I wrote
+to the Editor of _The Spectator_ a letter, titled, I think, "Thoreau's
+Pity and Humour," which he inserted.  This brought me a private letter
+from Stevenson, who expressed the wish to see me, and have some talk with
+me on that and other matters.  To this letter I at once replied,
+directing to 17 Heriot Row, Edinburgh, saying that, as I was soon to be
+in that City, it might be possible for me to see him there.  In reply to
+this letter Mr Stevenson wrote:
+
+   "THE COTTAGE, CASTLETON OF BRAEMAR,
+   _Sunday_, _August_ (? _th_), 1881.
+
+   "MY DEAR SIR,--I should long ago have written to thank you for your
+   kind and frank letter; but, in my state of health, papers are apt to
+   get mislaid, and your letter has been vainly hunted for until this
+   (Sunday) morning.
+
+   "I must first say a word as to not quoting your book by name.  It was
+   the consciousness that we disagreed which led me, I daresay, wrongly,
+   to suppress _all_ references throughout the paper.  But you may be
+   certain a proper reference will now be introduced.
+
+   "I regret I shall not be able to see you in Edinburgh: one visit to
+   Edinburgh has already cost me too dear in that invaluable particular,
+   health; but if it should be at all possible for you to pass by
+   Braemar, I believe you would find an attentive listener, and I can
+   offer you a bed, a drive, and necessary food.
+
+   "If, however, you should not be able to come thus far, I can promise
+   two things.  First, I shall religiously revise what I have written,
+   and bring out more clearly the point of view from which I regarded
+   Thoreau.  Second, I shall in the preface record your objection.
+
+   "The point of view (and I must ask you not to forget that any such
+   short paper is essentially only a _section through_ a man) was this: I
+   desired to look at the man through his books.  Thus, for instance,
+   when I mentioned his return to the pencil-making, I did it only in
+   passing (perhaps I was wrong), because it seemed to me not an
+   illustration of his principles, but a brave departure from them.
+   Thousands of such there were I do not doubt; still they might be
+   hardly to my purpose; though, as you say so, I suppose some of them
+   would be.
+
+   "Our difference as to 'pity,' I suspect, was a logomachy of my making.
+   No pitiful acts, on his part, would surprise me: I know he would be
+   more pitiful in practice than most of the whiners; but the spirit of
+   that practice would still seem to me to be unjustly described by the
+   word pity.
+
+   "When I try to be measured, I find myself usually suspected of a
+   sneaking unkindness for my subject, but you may be sure, sir, I would
+   give up most other things to be as good a man as Thoreau.  Even my
+   knowledge of him leads me thus far.
+
+   "Should you find yourself able to push on so far--it may even lie on
+   your way--believe me your visit will be very welcome.  The weather is
+   cruel, but the place is, as I daresay you know, the very _wale_ of
+   Scotland--bar Tummelside.--Yours very sincerely,
+
+   ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON."
+
+{Manuscript letter by R.L.S.: p6.jpg}
+
+Some delay took place in my leaving London for Scotland, and hence what
+seemed a hitch.  I wrote mentioning the reason of my delay, and
+expressing the fear that I might have to forego the prospect of seeing
+him in Braemar, as his circumstances might have altered in the meantime.
+In answer came this note, like so many, if not most of his, indeed,
+without date:--
+
+   THE COTTAGE, CASTLETON OF BRAEMAR.
+   (_No date_.)
+
+   "MY DEAR SIR,--I am here as yet a fixture, and beg you to come our
+   way.  Would Tuesday or Wednesday suit you by any chance?  We shall
+   then, I believe, be empty: a thing favourable to talks.  You get here
+   in time for dinner.  I stay till near the end of September, unless, as
+   may very well be, the weather drive me forth.--Yours very sincerely,
+   ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON."
+
+I accordingly went to Braemar, where he and his wife and her son were
+staying with his father and mother.
+
+These were red-letter days in my calendar alike on account of pleasant
+intercourse with his honoured father and himself.  Here is my pen-and-ink
+portrait of R. L. Stevenson, thrown down at the time:
+
+Mr Stevenson's is, indeed, a very picturesque and striking figure.  Not
+so tall probably as he seems at first sight from his extreme thinness,
+but the pose and air could not be otherwise described than as
+distinguished.  Head of fine type, carried well on the shoulders and in
+walking with the impression of being a little thrown back; long brown
+hair, falling from under a broadish-brimmed Spanish form of soft felt
+hat, Rembrandtesque; loose kind of Inverness cape when walking, and
+invariable velvet jacket inside the house.  You would say at first sight,
+wherever you saw him, that he was a man of intellect, artistic and
+individual, wholly out of the common.  His face is sensitive, full of
+expression, though it could not be called strictly beautiful.  It is
+longish, especially seen in profile, and features a little irregular; the
+brow at once high and broad.  A hint of vagary, and just a hint in the
+expression, is qualified by the eyes, which are set rather far apart from
+each other as seems, and with a most wistful, and at the same time
+possibly a merry impish expression arising over that, yet frank and
+clear, piercing, but at the same time steady, and fall on you with a
+gentle radiance and animation as he speaks.  Romance, if with an
+indescribable _soupcon_ of whimsicality, is marked upon him; sometimes he
+has the look as of the Ancient Mariner, and could fix you with his
+glittering e'e, and he would, as he points his sentences with a movement
+of his thin white forefinger, when this is not monopolised with the
+almost incessant cigarette.  There is a faint suggestion of a
+hair-brained sentimental trace on his countenance, but controlled, after
+all, by good Scotch sense and shrewdness.  In conversation he is very
+animated, and likes to ask questions.  A favourite and characteristic
+attitude with him was to put his foot on a chair or stool and rest his
+elbow on his knee, with his chin on his hand; or to sit, or rather to
+half sit, half lean, on the corner of a table or desk, one of his legs
+swinging freely, and when anything that tickled him was said he would
+laugh in the heartiest manner, even at the risk of bringing on his cough,
+which at that time was troublesome.  Often when he got animated he rose
+and walked about as he spoke, as if movement aided thought and
+expression.  Though he loved Edinburgh, which was full of associations
+for him, he had no good word for its east winds, which to him were as
+death.  Yet he passed one winter as a "Silverado squatter," the story of
+which he has inimitably told in the volume titled _The Silverado
+Squatters_; and he afterwards spent several winters at Davos Platz,
+where, as he said to me, he not only breathed good air, but learned to
+know with closest intimacy John Addington Symonds, who "though his books
+were good, was far finer and more interesting than any of his books."  He
+needed a good deal of nursery attentions, but his invalidism was never
+obtrusively brought before one in any sympathy-seeking way by himself; on
+the contrary, a very manly, self-sustaining spirit was evident; and the
+amount of work which he managed to turn out even when at his worst was
+truly surprising.
+
+His wife, an American lady, is highly cultured, and is herself an author.
+In her speech there is just the slightest suggestion of the American
+accent, which only made it the more pleasing to my ear.  She is heart and
+soul devoted to her husband, proud of his achievements, and her delight
+is the consciousness of substantially aiding him in his enterprises.
+
+They then had with them a boy of eleven or twelve, Samuel Lloyd Osbourne,
+to be much referred to later (a son of Mrs Stevenson by a former
+marriage), whose delight was to draw the oddest, but perhaps half
+intentional or unintentional caricatures, funny, in some cases, beyond
+expression.  His room was designated the picture-gallery, and on entering
+I could scarce refrain from bursting into laughter, even at the general
+effect, and, noticing this, and that I was putting some restraint on
+myself out of respect for the host's feelings, Stevenson said to me with
+a sly wink and a gentle dig in the ribs, "It's laugh and be thankful
+here."  On Lloyd's account simple engraving materials, types, and a small
+printing-press had been procured; and it was Stevenson's delight to make
+funny poems, stories, and morals for the engravings executed, and all
+would be duly printed together.  Stevenson's thorough enjoyment of the
+picture-gallery, and his goodness to Lloyd, becoming himself a very boy
+for the nonce, were delightful to witness and in degree to share.
+Wherever they were--at Braemar, in Edinburgh, at Davos Platz, or even at
+Silverado--the engraving and printing went on.  The mention of the
+picture-gallery suggests that it was out of his interest in the colour-
+drawing and the picture-gallery that his first published story, _Treasure
+Island_, grew, as we shall see.
+
+I have some copies of the rude printing-press productions, inexpressibly
+quaint, grotesque, a kind of literary horse-play, yet with a certain
+squint-eyed, sprawling genius in it, and innocent childish Rabelaisian
+mirth of a sort.  At all events I cannot look at the slight memorials of
+that time, which I still possess, without laughing afresh till my eyes
+are dewy.  Stevenson, as I understood, began _Treasure Island_ more to
+entertain Lloyd Osbourne than anything else; the chapters being regularly
+read to the family circle as they were written, and with scarcely a
+purpose beyond.  The lad became Stevenson's trusted companion and
+collaborator--clearly with a touch of genius.
+
+I have before me as I write some of these funny momentoes of that time,
+carefully kept, often looked at.  One of them is, "_The Black Canyon_;
+_or_, _Wild Adventures in the Far West_: a Tale of Instruction and
+Amusement for the Young, by Samuel L. Osbourne, printed by the author;
+Davos Platz," with the most remarkable cuts.  It would not do some of the
+sensationalists anything but good to read it even at this day, since many
+points in their art are absurdly caricatured.  Another is "_Moral
+Emblems_; _a Collection of Cuts and Verses_, by R. L. Stevenson, author
+of the _Blue Scalper_, etc., etc.  Printers, S. L. Osbourne and Company,
+Davos Platz."  Here are the lines to a rare piece of grotesque, titled _A
+Peak in Darien_--
+
+   "Broad-gazing on untrodden lands,
+   See where adventurous Cortez stands,
+   While in the heavens above his head,
+   The eagle seeks its daily bread.
+   How aptly fact to fact replies,
+   Heroes and eagles, hills and skies.
+   Ye, who contemn the fatted slave,
+   Look on this emblem and be brave."
+
+Another, _The Elephant_, has these lines--
+
+   "See in the print how, moved by whim,
+   Trumpeting Jumbo, great and grim,
+   Adjusts his trunk, like a cravat,
+   To noose that individual's hat;
+   The Sacred Ibis in the distance,
+   Joys to observe his bold resistance."
+
+R. L. Stevenson wrote from Davos Platz, in sending me _The Black Canyon_:
+
+   "Sam sends as a present a work of his own.  I hope you feel flattered,
+   for _this is simply the first time he has ever given one away_.  I
+   have to buy my own works, I can tell you."
+
+Later he said, in sending a second:
+
+   "I own I have delayed this letter till I could forward the enclosed.
+   Remembering the night at Braemar, when we visited the picture-gallery,
+   I hope it may amuse you: you see we do some publishing hereaway."
+
+Delightfully suggestive and highly enjoyable, too, were the meetings in
+the little drawing-room after dinner, when the contrasted traits of
+father and son came into full play--when R. L. Stevenson would sometimes
+draw out a new view by bold, half-paradoxical assertion, or compel
+advance on the point from a new quarter by a searching question couched
+in the simplest language, or reveal his own latest conviction finally, by
+a few sentences as nicely rounded off as though they had been written,
+while he rose and gently moved about, as his habit was, in the course of
+those more extended remarks.  Then a chapter or two of _The Sea-Cook_
+would be read, with due pronouncement on the main points by one or other
+of the family audience.
+
+The reading of the book is one thing.  It was quite another thing to hear
+Stevenson as he stood reading it aloud, with his hand stretched out
+holding the manuscript, and his body gently swaying as a kind of
+rhythmical commentary on the story.  His fine voice, clear and keen it
+some of its tones, had a wonderful power of inflection and variation, and
+when he came to stand in the place of Silver you could almost have
+imagined you saw the great one-legged John Silver, joyous-eyed, on the
+rolling sea.  Yes, to read it in print was good, but better yet to hear
+Stevenson read it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--_TREASURE ISLAND_ AND SOME REMINISCENCES
+
+
+When I left Braemar, I carried with me a considerable portion of the MS.
+of _Treasure Island_, with an outline of the rest of the story.  It
+originally bore the odd title of _The Sea-Cook_, and, as I have told
+before, I showed it to Mr Henderson, the proprietor of the _Young Folks'
+Paper_, who came to an arrangement with Mr Stevenson, and the story duly
+appeared in its pages, as well as the two which succeeded it.
+
+Stevenson himself in his article in _The Idler_ for August 1894
+(reprinted in _My First Book_ volume and in a late volume of the
+_Edinburgh Edition_) has recalled some of the circumstances connected
+with this visit of mine to Braemar, as it bore on the destination of
+_Treasure Island_:
+
+   "And now, who should come dropping in, _ex machina_, but Dr Japp, like
+   the disguised prince, who is to bring down the curtain upon peace and
+   happiness in the last act; for he carried in his pocket, not a horn or
+   a talisman, but a publisher, in fact, ready to unearth new writers for
+   my old friend Mr Henderson's _Young Folks_.  Even the ruthlessness of
+   a united family recoiled before the extreme measure of inflicting on
+   our guest the mutilated members of _The Sea-Cook_; at the same time,
+   we would by no means stop our readings, and accordingly the tale was
+   begun again at the beginning, and solemnly redelivered for the benefit
+   of Dr Japp.  From that moment on, I have thought highly of his
+   critical faculty; for when he left us, he carried away the manuscript
+   in his portmanteau.
+
+   "_Treasure Island_--it was Mr Henderson who deleted the first title,
+   _The Sea-Cook_--appeared duly in _Young Folks_, where it figured in
+   the ignoble midst without woodcuts, and attracted not the least
+   attention.  I did not care.  I liked the tale myself, for much the
+   same reason as my father liked the beginning: it was my kind of
+   picturesque.  I was not a little proud of John Silver also; and to
+   this day rather admire that smooth and formidable adventurer.  What
+   was infinitely more exhilarating, I had passed a landmark.  I had
+   finished a tale and written The End upon my manuscript, as I had not
+   done since _The Pentland Rising_, when I was a boy of sixteen, not yet
+   at college.  In truth, it was so by a lucky set of accidents: had not
+   Dr Japp come on his visit, had not the tale flowed from me with
+   singular ease, it must have been laid aside, like its predecessors,
+   and found a circuitous and unlamented way to the fire.  Purists may
+   suggest it would have been better so.  I am not of that mind.  The
+   tale seems to have given much pleasure, and it brought (or was the
+   means of bringing) fire, food, and wine to a deserving family in which
+   I took an interest.  I need scarcely say I mean my own."
+
+He himself gives a goodly list of the predecessors which had found a
+circuitous and unlamented way to the fire
+
+   "As soon as I was able to write, I became a good friend to the paper-
+   makers.  Reams upon reams must have gone to the making of _Rathillet_,
+   _The Pentland Rising_, _The King's Pardon_ (otherwise _Park
+   Whitehead_), _Edward Daven_, _A Country Dance_, and _A Vendetta in the
+   West_.  _Rathillet_ was attempted before fifteen, _The Vendetta_ at
+   twenty-nine, and the succession of defeats lasted unbroken till I was
+   thirty-one."
+
+Another thing I carried from Braemar with me which I greatly prize--this
+was a copy of _Christianity confirmed by Jewish and Heathen Testimony_,
+by Mr Stevenson's father, with his autograph signature and many of his
+own marginal notes.  He had thought deeply on many subjects--theological,
+scientific, and social--and had recorded, I am afraid, but the smaller
+half of his thoughts and speculations.  Several days in the mornings,
+before R. L. Stevenson was able to face the somewhat "snell" air of the
+hills, I had long walks with the old gentleman, when we also had long
+talks on many subjects--the liberalising of the Scottish Church,
+educational reform, etc.; and, on one occasion, a statement of his
+reason, because of the subscription, for never having become an elder.
+That he had in some small measure enjoyed my society, as I certainly had
+much enjoyed his, was borne out by a letter which I received from the son
+in reply to one I had written, saying that surely his father had never
+meant to present me at the last moment on my leaving by coach with that
+volume, with his name on it, and with pencilled notes here and there, but
+had merely given it me to read and return.  In the circumstances I may
+perhaps be excused quoting from a letter dated Castleton of Braemar,
+September 1881, in illustration of what I have said--
+
+   "MY DEAR DR JAPP,--My father has gone, but I think I may take it upon
+   me to ask you to keep the book.  Of all things you could do to endear
+   yourself to me you have done the best, for, from your letter, you have
+   taken a fancy to my father.
+
+   "I do not know how to thank you for your kind trouble in the matter of
+   _The Sea-Cook_, but I am not unmindful.  My health is still poorly,
+   and I have added intercostal rheumatism--a new attraction, which sewed
+   me up nearly double for two days, and still gives me 'a list to
+   starboard'--let us be ever nautical. . . . I do not think with the
+   start I have, there will be any difficulty in letting Mr Henderson go
+   ahead whenever he likes.  I will write my story up to its legitimate
+   conclusion, and then we shall be in a position to judge whether a
+   sequel would be desirable, and I myself would then know better about
+   its practicability from the story-telling point of view.--Yours very
+   sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON."
+
+A little later came the following:--
+
+   "THE COTTAGE, CASTLETON OF BRAEMAR.
+   (_No date_.)
+
+   "MY DEAR DR JAPP,--Herewith go nine chapters.  I have been a little
+   seedy; and the two last that I have written seem to me on a false
+   venue; hence the smallness of the batch.  I have now, I hope, in the
+   three last sent, turned the corner, with no great amount of dulness.
+
+   "The map, with all its names, notes, soundings, and things, should
+   make, I believe, an admirable advertisement for the story.  Eh?
+
+   "I hope you got a telegram and letter I forwarded after you to
+   Dinnat.--Believe me, yours very sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON."
+
+In the afternoon, if fine and dry, we went walking, and Stevenson would
+sometimes tell us stories of his short experience at the Scottish Bar,
+and of his first and only brief.  I remember him contrasting that with
+his experiences as an engineer with Bob Bain, who, as manager, was then
+superintending the building of a breakwater.  Of that time, too, he told
+the choicest stories, and especially of how, against all orders, he
+bribed Bob with five shillings to let him go down in the diver's dress.
+He gave us a splendid description--finer, I think, than even that in his
+_Memories_--of his sensations on the sea-bottom, which seems to have
+interested him as deeply, and suggested as many strange fancies, as
+anything which he ever came across on the surface.  But the possibility
+of enterprises of this sort ended--Stevenson lost his interest in
+engineering.
+
+{Manuscript letter by R.L.S.: p20.jpg}
+
+Stevenson's father had, indeed, been much exercised in his day by
+theological questions and difficulties, and though he remained a staunch
+adherent of the Established Church of Scotland he knew well and
+practically what is meant by the term "accommodation," as it is used by
+theologians in reference to creeds and formulas; for he had over and over
+again, because of the strict character of the subscription required from
+elders of the Scottish Church declined, as I have said, to accept the
+office.  In a very express sense you could see that he bore the marks of
+his past in many ways--a quick, sensitive, in some ways even a fantastic-
+minded man, yet with a strange solidity and common-sense amid it all,
+just as though ferns with the veritable fairies' seed were to grow out of
+a common stone wall.  He looked like a man who had not been without
+sleepless nights--without troubles, sorrows, and perplexities, and even
+yet, had not wholly risen above some of them, or the results of them.  His
+voice was "low and sweet"--with just a possibility in it of rising to a
+shrillish key.  A sincere and faithful man, who had walked very demurely
+through life, though with a touch of sudden, bright, quiet humour and
+fancy, every now and then crossing the grey of his characteristic
+pensiveness or melancholy, and drawing effect from it.  He was most frank
+and genial with me, and I greatly honour his memory. {2}
+
+Thomas Stevenson, with a strange, sad smile, told me how much of a
+disappointment, in the first stage, at all events, Louis (he always
+called his son Louis at home), had caused him, by failing to follow up
+his profession at the Scottish Bar.  How much he had looked forward,
+after the engineering was abandoned, to his devoting himself to the work
+of the Parliament House (as the Hall of the Chief Court is called in
+Scotland, from the building having been while yet there was a Scottish
+Parliament the place where it sat), though truly one cannot help feeling
+how much Stevenson's very air and figure would have been out of keeping
+among the bewigged, pushing, sharp-set, hard-featured, and even red-faced
+and red-nosed (some of them, at any rate) company, who daily walked the
+Parliament House, and talked and gossiped there, often of other things
+than law and equity.  "Well, yes, perhaps it was all for the best," he
+said, with a sigh, on my having interjected the remark that R. L.
+Stevenson was wielding far more influence than he ever could have done as
+a Scottish counsel, even though he had risen rapidly in his profession,
+and become Lord-Advocate or even a judge.
+
+There was, indeed, a very pathetic kind of harking back on the might-have-
+beens when I talked with him on this subject.  He had reconciled himself
+in a way to the inevitable, and, like a sensible man, was now inclined to
+make the most and the best of it.  The marriage, which, on the report of
+it, had been but a new disappointment to him, had, as if by magic, been
+transformed into a blessing in his mind and his wife's by personal
+contact with Fanny Van der Griff Stevenson, which no one who ever met her
+could wonder at; but, nevertheless, his dream of seeing his only son
+walking in the pathways of the Stevensons, and adorning a profession in
+Edinburgh, and so winning new and welcome laurels for the family and the
+name, was still present with him constantly, and by contrast, he was
+depressed with contemplation of the real state of the case, when, as I
+have said, I pointed out to him, as more than once I did, what an
+influence his son was wielding now, not only over those near to him, but
+throughout the world, compared with what could have come to him as a
+lighthouse engineer, however successful, or it may be as a briefless
+advocate or barrister, walking, hardly in glory and in joy, the Hall of
+the Edinburgh Parliament House.  And when I pictured the yet greater
+influence that was sure to come to him, he only shook his head with that
+smile which tells of hopes long-cherished and lost at last, and of
+resignation gained, as though at stern duty's call and an honest desire
+for the good of those near and dear to him.  It moved me more than I can
+say, and always in the midst of it he adroitly, and somewhat abruptly,
+changed the subject.  Such penalties do parents often pay for the honour
+of giving geniuses to the world.  Here, again, it may be true, "the
+individual withers but the world is more and more."
+
+The impression of a kind of tragic fatality was but added to when
+Stevenson would speak of his father in such terms of love and admiration
+as quite moved one, of his desire to please him, of his highest respect
+and gratitude to him, and pride in having such a father.  It was most
+characteristic that when, in his travels in America, he met a gentleman
+who expressed plainly his keen disappointment on learning that he had but
+been introduced to the son and not to the father--to the as yet but
+budding author--and not to the builder of the great lighthouse beacons
+that constantly saved mariners from shipwreck round many stormy coasts,
+he should record the incident, as his readers will remember, with such a
+strange mixture of a pride and filial gratitude, and half humorous
+humiliation.  Such is the penalty a son of genius often pays in heart-
+throbs for the inability to do aught else but follow his destiny--follow
+his star, even though as Dante says:--
+
+   "Se tu segui tua stella
+   Non puoi fallire a glorioso porto." {3}
+
+What added a keen thrill as of quivering flesh exposed, was that Thomas
+Stevenson on one side was exactly the man to appreciate such attainments
+and work in another, and I often wondered how far the sense of Edinburgh
+propriety and worldly estimates did weigh with him here.
+
+Mr Stevenson mentioned to me a peculiar fact which has since been noted
+by his son, that, notwithstanding the kind of work he had so successfully
+engaged in, he was no mathematician, and had to submit his calculations
+to another to be worked out in definite mathematical formulae.  Thomas
+Stevenson gave one the impression of a remarkably sweet, great
+personality, grave, anxious, almost morbidly forecasting, yet full of
+childlike hope and ready affection, but, perhaps, so earnestly taken up
+with some points as to exaggerate their importance and be too
+self-conscious and easily offended in respect to them.  But there was no
+affectation in him.  He was simple-minded, sincere to the core; most
+kindly, homely, hospitable, much intent on brotherly offices.  He had the
+Scottish _perfervidum_ too--he could tolerate nothing mean or creeping;
+and his eye would lighten and glance in a striking manner when such was
+spoken of.  I have since heard that his charities were very extensive,
+and dispensed in the most hidden and secret ways.  He acted here on the
+Scripture direction, "Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand
+doeth."  He was much exercised when I saw him about some defects, as he
+held, in the methods of Scotch education (for he was a true lover of
+youth, and cared more for character being formed than for heads being
+merely crammed).  Sagacious, with fine forecast, with a high ideal, and
+yet up to a certain point a most tolerant temper, he was a fine specimen
+of the Scottish gentleman.  His son tells that, as he was engaged in work
+calculated to benefit the world and to save life, he would not for long
+take out a patent for his inventions, and thus lost immense sums.  I can
+well believe that: it seems quite in keeping with my impressions of the
+man.  There was nothing stolid or selfishly absorbed in him.  He bore the
+marks of deep, true, honest feeling, true benevolence, and open-handed
+generosity, and despite the son's great pen-craft, and inventive power,
+would have forgiven my saying that sometimes I have had a doubt whether
+the father was not, after all, the greater man of the two, though
+certainly not, like the hero of _In Memoriam_, moulded "in colossal
+calm."
+
+In theological matters, in which Thomas Stevenson had been much and
+deeply exercised, he held very strong views, leading decisively to ultra-
+Calvinism; but, as I myself could well sympathise with such views, if I
+did not hold them, knowing well the strange ways in which they had gone
+to form grand, if sometimes sternly forbidding characters, there were no
+cross-purposes as there might have been with some on that subject.  And
+always I felt I had an original character and a most interesting one to
+study.
+
+This is another very characteristic letter to me from Davos Platz:
+
+   "CHALET BUOL, DAVOS, GRISONS,
+   SWITZERLAND.  (_No date_.)
+
+   "MY DEAR DR JAPP,--You must think me a forgetful rogue, as indeed I
+   am; for I have but now told my publisher to send you a copy of the
+   _Familiar Studies_.  However, I own I have delayed this letter till I
+   could send you the enclosed.  Remembering the night at Braemar, when
+   we visited the picture-gallery, I hoped they might amuse you.
+
+   "You see we do some publishing hereaway.
+
+   "With kind regards, believe me, always yours faithfully,
+
+   ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON."
+
+   "I shall hope to see you in town in May."
+
+The enclosed was the second series of _Moral Emblems_, by R. L.
+Stevenson, printed by Samuel Osbourne.  My answer to this letter brought
+the following:
+
+   "CHALET-BUOL, DAVOS,
+   _April_ 1_st_, 1882.
+
+   "MY DEAR DR JAPP,--A good day to date this letter, which is, in fact,
+   a confession of incapacity.  During my wife's wretched illness--or I
+   should say the worst of it, for she is not yet rightly well--I
+   somewhat lost my head, and entirely lost a great quire of corrected
+   proofs.  This is one of the results: I hope there are none more
+   serious.  I was never so sick of any volume as I was of that; I was
+   continually receiving fresh proofs with fresh infinitesimal
+   difficulties.  I was ill; I did really fear, for my wife was worse
+   than ill.  Well, 'tis out now; and though I have already observed
+   several carelessnesses myself, and now here is another of your
+   finding--of which indeed, I ought to be ashamed--it will only justify
+   the sweeping humility of the preface.
+
+   "Symonds was actually dining with us when your letter came, and I
+   communicated your remarks, which pleased him.  He is a far better and
+   more interesting thing than his books.
+
+   "The elephant was my wife's, so she is proportionately elate you
+   should have picked it out for praise from a collection, let us add, so
+   replete with the highest qualities of art.
+
+   "My wicked carcass, as John Knox calls it, holds together wonderfully.
+   In addition to many other things, and a volume of travel, I find I
+   have written since December ninety Cornhill pp. of Magazine
+   work--essays and stories--40,000 words; and I am none the worse--I am
+   better.  I begin to hope I may, if not outlive this wolverine upon my
+   shoulders, at least carry him bravely like Symonds or Alexander Pope.
+   I begin to take a pride in that hope.
+
+   "I shall be much interested to see your criticisms: you might perhaps
+   send them on to me.  I believe you know that I am not dangerous--one
+   folly I have not--I am not touchy under criticism.
+
+   "Sam and my wife both beg to be remembered, and Sam also sends as a
+   present a work of his own.--Yours very sincerely,
+
+   ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON."
+
+As indicating the estimate of many of the good Edinburgh people of
+Stevenson and the Stevensons that still held sway up to so late a date as
+1893, I will here extract two characteristic passages from the letters of
+the friend and correspondent of these days just referred to, and to whom
+I had sent a copy of the _Atalanta_ Magazine, with an article of mine on
+Stevenson.
+
+   "If you can excuse the garrulity of age, I can tell you one or two
+   things about Louis Stevenson, his father and even his grandfather,
+   which you may work up some other day, as you have so deftly embedded
+   in the _Atalanta_ article that small remark on his acting.  Your paper
+   is pleasant and modest: most of R. L. Stevenson's admirers are
+   inclined to lay it on far too thick.  That he is a genius we all
+   admit; but his genius, if fine, is limited.  For example, he cannot
+   paint (or at least he never has painted) a woman.  No more could
+   Fettes Douglas, skilful artist though he was in his own special line,
+   and I shall tell you a remark of Russel's thereon some day. {4}  There
+   are women in his books, but there is none of the beauty and subtlety
+   of womanhood in them.
+
+   "R. L. Stevenson I knew well as a lad and often met him and talked
+   with him.  He acted in private theatricals got up by the late
+   Professor Fleeming Jenkin.  But he had then, as always, a pretty guid
+   conceit o' himsel'--which his clique have done nothing to check.  His
+   father and his grandfather (I have danced with his mother before her
+   marriage) I knew better; but 'the family theologian,' as some of R. L.
+   Stevenson's friends dabbed his father, was a very touchy theologian,
+   and denounced any one who in the least differed from his extreme
+   Calvinistic views.  I came under his lash most unwittingly in this way
+   myself.  But for this twist, he was a good fellow--kind and
+   hospitable--and a really able man in his profession.  His father-in-
+   law, R. L. Stevenson's maternal grandfather, was the Rev. Dr Balfour,
+   minister of Colinton--one of the finest-looking old men I ever
+   saw--tall, upright, and ruddy at eighty.  But he was marvellously
+   feeble as a preacher, and often said things that were deliciously,
+   unconsciously, unintentionally laughable, if not witty.  We were near
+   Colinton for some years; and Mr Russell (of the _Scotsman_), who once
+   attended the Parish Church with us, was greatly tickled by Balfour
+   discoursing on the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife, remarking that
+   Mrs P-'s conduct was 'highly improper'!"
+
+The estimate of R. L. Stevenson was not and could not be final in this
+case, for _Weir of Hermiston_ and _Catriona_ were yet unwritten, not to
+speak of others, but the passages reflect a certain side of Edinburgh
+opinion, illustrating the old Scripture doctrine that a prophet has
+honour everywhere but in his own country.  And the passages themselves
+bear evidence that I violate no confidence then, for they were given to
+me to be worked into any after-effort I might make on Stevenson.  My
+friend was a good and an acute critic who had done some acceptable
+literary work in his day.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--THE CHILD FATHER OF THE MAN
+
+
+R. L. Stevenson was born on 13th November 1850, the very year of the
+death of his grandfather, Robert Stevenson, whom he has so finely
+celebrated.  As a mere child he gave token of his character.  As soon as
+he could read, he was keen for books, and, before very long, had read all
+the story-books he could lay hands on; and, when the stock ran out, he
+would go and look in at all the shop windows within reach, and try to
+piece out the stories from the bits exposed in open pages and the
+woodcuts.
+
+He had a nurse of very remarkable character--evidently a paragon--who
+deeply influenced him and did much to form his young mind--Alison
+Cunningham, who, in his juvenile lingo, became "Cumy," and who not only
+was never forgotten, but to the end was treated as his "second mother."
+In his dedication of his _Child's Garden of Verses_ to her, he says:
+
+   "My second mother, my first wife,
+   The angel of my infant life."
+
+Her copy of _Kidnapped_ was inscribed to her by the hand of Stevenson,
+thus:
+
+   "TO CUMY, FROM HER BOY, THE AUTHOR.
+   SKERRYVORE, 18_th_ _July_ 1888."
+
+Skerryvore was the name of Stevenson's Bournemouth home, so named after
+one of the Stevenson lighthouses.  His first volume, _An Inland Voyage_
+has this pretty dedication, inscribed in a neat, small hand:
+
+   "MY DEAR CUMY,--If you had not taken so much trouble with me all the
+   years of my childhood, this little book would never have been written.
+   Many a long night you sat up with me when I was ill.  I wish I could
+   hope, by way of return, to amuse a single evening for you with my
+   little book.  But whatever you think of it, I know you will think
+   kindly of
+
+   THE AUTHOR."
+
+"Cumy" was perhaps the most influential teacher Stevenson had.  What she
+and his mother taught took effect and abode with him, which was hardly
+the case with any other of his teachers.
+
+   "In contrast to Goethe," says Mr Baildon, "Stevenson was but little
+   affected by his relations to women, and, when this point is fully gone
+   into, it will probably be found that his mother and nurse in
+   childhood, and his wife and step-daughter in later life, are about the
+   only women who seriously influenced either his character or his art."
+   (p. 32).
+
+When Mr Kelman is celebrating Stevenson for the consistency and
+continuity of his undogmatic religion, he is almost throughout
+celebrating "Cumy" and her influence, though unconsciously.  Here, again,
+we have an apt and yet more striking illustration, after that of the good
+Lord Shaftesbury and many others, of the deep and lasting effect a good
+and earnest woman, of whom the world may never hear, may have had upon a
+youngster of whom all the world shall hear.  When Mr Kelman says that
+"the religious element in Stevenson was not a thing of late growth, but
+an integral part and vital interest of his life," he but points us back
+to the earlier religious influences to which he had been effectually
+subject.  "His faith was not for himself alone, and the phases of
+Christianity which it has asserted are peculiarly suited to the spiritual
+needs of many in the present time."
+
+We should not lay so much weight as Mr Kelman does on the mere number of
+times "the Divine name" is found in Stevenson's writings, but there is
+something in such confessions as the following to his father, when he
+was, amid hardship and illness, in Paris in 1878:
+
+   "Still I believe in myself and my fellow-men and the God who made us
+   all. . . . I am lonely and sick and out of heart.  Well, I still hope;
+   I still believe; I still see the good in the inch, and cling to it.  It
+   is not much, perhaps, but it is always something."
+
+Yes, "Cumy" was a very effective teacher, whose influence and teaching
+long remained.  His other teachers, however famous and highly gifted, did
+not attain to such success with him.  And because of this non-success
+they blamed him, as is usual.  He was fond of playing truant--declared,
+indeed, that he was about as methodic a truant as ever could have
+existed.  He much loved to go on long wanderings by himself on the
+Pentland Hills and read about the Covenanters, and while yet a youth of
+sixteen he wrote _The Pentland Rising_--a pamphlet in size and a piece of
+fine work--which was duly published, is now scarce, and fetches a high
+price.  He had made himself thoroughly familiar with all the odd old
+corners of Edinburgh--John Knox's haunts and so on, all which he has
+turned to account in essays, descriptions and in stories--especially in
+_Catriona_.  When a mere youth at school, as he tells us himself, he had
+little or no desire to carry off prizes and do just as other boys did; he
+was always wishing to observe, and to see, and try things for
+himself--was, in fact, in the eyes of schoolmasters and tutors something
+of an _idler_, with splendid gifts which he would not rightly apply.  He
+was applying them rightly, though not in their way.  It is not only in
+his _Apology for Idlers_ that this confession is made, but elsewhere, as
+in his essay on _A College Magazine_, where he says, "I was always busy
+on my own private end, which was to learn to write.  I kept always two
+books in my pocket, one to read and one to write in!"
+
+When he went to College it was still the same--he tells us in the
+funniest way how he managed to wheedle a certificate for Greek out of
+Professor Blackie, though the Professor owned "his face was not familiar
+to him"!  He fared very differently when, afterwards his father, eager
+that he should follow his profession, got him to enter the civil
+engineering class under Professor Fleeming Jenkin.  He still stuck to his
+old courses--wandering about, and, in sheltered corners, writing in the
+open air, and was not present in class more than a dozen times.  When the
+session was ended he went up to try for a certificate from Fleeming
+Jenkin.  "No, no, Mr Stevenson," said the Professor; "I might give it in
+a doubtful case, but yours is not doubtful: you have not kept my
+classes."  And the most characteristic thing--honourable to both men--is
+to come; for this was the beginning of a friendship which grew and
+strengthened and is finally celebrated in the younger man's sketch of the
+elder.  He learned from Professor Fleeming Jenkin, perhaps unconsciously,
+more of the _humaniores_, than consciously he did of engineering.  A
+friend of mine, who knew well both the Stevenson family and the Balfours,
+to which R. L. Stevenson's mother belonged, recalls, as we have seen, his
+acting in the private theatricals that were got up by the Professor, and
+adds, "He was then a very handsome fellow, and looked splendidly as Sir
+Charles Pomander, and essayed, not wholly without success, Sir Peter
+Teazle," which one can well believe, no less than that he acted such
+parts splendidly as well as looked them.
+
+_Longman's Magazine_, immediately after his death, published the
+following poem, which took a very pathetic touch from the circumstances
+of its appearance--the more that, while it imaginatively and finely
+commemorated these days of truant wanderings, it showed the ruling
+passion for home and the old haunts, strongly and vividly, even not
+unnigh to death:
+
+   "The tropics vanish, and meseems that I,
+   From Halkerside, from topmost Allermuir,
+   Or steep Caerketton, dreaming gaze again.
+   Far set in fields and woods, the town I see
+   Spring gallant from the shallows of her smoke,
+   Cragg'd, spired, and turreted, her virgin fort
+   Beflagg'd.  About, on seaward drooping hills,
+   New folds of city glitter.  Last, the Forth
+   Wheels ample waters set with sacred isles,
+   And populous Fife smokes with a score of towns,
+   There, on the sunny frontage of a hill,
+   Hard by the house of kings, repose the dead,
+   My dead, the ready and the strong of word.
+   Their works, the salt-encrusted, still survive;
+   The sea bombards their founded towers; the night
+   Thrills pierced with their strong lamps.  The artificers,
+   One after one, here in this grated cell,
+   Where the rain erases and the rust consumes,
+   Fell upon lasting silence.  Continents
+   And continental oceans intervene;
+   A sea uncharted, on a lampless isle,
+   Environs and confines their wandering child
+   In vain.  The voice of generations dead
+   Summons me, sitting distant, to arise,
+   My numerous footsteps nimbly to retrace,
+   And all mutation over, stretch me down
+   In that denoted city of the dead."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--HEREDITY ILLUSTRATED
+
+
+At first sight it would seem hard to trace any illustration of the
+doctrine of heredity in the case of this master of romance.  George
+Eliot's dictum that we are, each one of us, but an omnibus carrying down
+the traits of our ancestors, does not appear at all to hold here.  This
+fanciful realist, this naive-wistful humorist, this dreamy mystical
+casuist, crossed by the innocent bohemian, this serious and genial
+essayist, in whom the deep thought was hidden by the gracious play of wit
+and phantasy, came, on the father's side, of a stock of what the world
+regarded as a quiet, ingenious, demure, practical, home-keeping people.
+In his rich colour, originality, and graceful air, it is almost as though
+the bloom of japonica came on a rich old orchard apple-tree, all out of
+season too.  Those who go hard on heredity would say, perhaps, that he
+was the result of some strange back-stroke.  But, on closer examination,
+we need not go so far.  His grandfather, Robert Stevenson, the great
+lighthouse-builder, the man who reared the iron-bound pillar on the
+destructive Bell Rock, and set life-saving lights there, was very intent
+on his professional work, yet he had his ideal, and romantic, and
+adventurous side.  In the delightful sketch which his famous grandson
+gave of him, does he not tell of the joy Robert Stevenson had on the
+annual voyage in the _Lighthouse Yacht_--how it was looked forward to,
+yearned for, and how, when he had Walter Scott on board, his fund of
+story and reminiscence all through the tour never failed--how Scott drew
+upon it in _The Pirate_ and the notes to _The Pirate_, and with what
+pride Robert Stevenson preserved the lines Scott wrote in the lighthouse
+album at the Bell Rock on that occasion:
+
+   "PHAROS LOQUITUR
+
+   "Far in the bosom of the deep
+   O'er these wild shelves my watch I keep,
+   A ruddy gem of changeful light
+   Bound on the dusky brow of night.
+   The seaman bids my lustre hail,
+   And scorns to strike his timorous sail."
+
+And how in 1850 the old man, drawing nigh unto death, was with the utmost
+difficulty dissuaded from going the voyage once more, and was found
+furtively in his room packing his portmanteau in spite of the protests of
+all his family, and would have gone but for the utter weakness of death.
+
+His father was also a splendid engineer; was full of invention and
+devoted to his profession, but he, too, was not without his romances, and
+even vagaries.  He loved a story, was a fine teller of stories, used to
+sit at night and spin the most wondrous yarns, a man of much reserve, yet
+also of much power in discourse, with an aptness and felicity in the use
+of phrases--so much so, as his son tells, that on his deathbed, when his
+power of speech was passing from him, and he couldn't articulate the
+right word, he was silent rather than use the wrong one.  I shall never
+forget how in these early morning walks at Braemar, finding me
+sympathetic, he unbent with the air of a man who had unexpectedly found
+something he had sought, and was fairly confidential.
+
+On the mother's side our author came of ministers.  His maternal
+grandfather, the Rev. Dr Balfour of Colinton, was a man of handsome
+presence, tall, venerable-looking, and not without a mingled authority
+and humour of his own--no very great preacher, I have heard, but would
+sometimes bring a smile to the faces of his hearers by very naive and
+original ways of putting things.  R. L. Stevenson quaintly tells a story
+of how his grandfather when he had physic to take, and was indulged in a
+sweet afterwards, yet would not allow the child to have a sweet because
+he had not had the physic.  A veritable Calvinist in daily action--from
+him, no doubt, our subject drew much of his interest in certain
+directions--John Knox, Scottish history, the '15 and the '45, and no
+doubt much that justifies the line "something of shorter-catechist," as
+applied by Henley to Stevenson among very contrasted traits indeed.
+
+But strange truly are the interblendings of race, and the way in which
+traits of ancestors reappear, modifying and transforming each other.  The
+gardener knows what can be done by grafts and buddings; but more
+wonderful far than anything there, are the mysterious blendings and
+outbursts of what is old and forgotten, along with what is wholly new and
+strange, and all going to produce often what we call sometimes
+eccentricity, and sometimes originality and genius.
+
+Mr J. F. George, in _Scottish Notes and Queries_, wrote as follows on
+Stevenson's inheritances and indebtedness to certain of his ancestors:
+
+   "About 1650, James Balfour, one of the Principal Clerks of the Court
+   of Session, married Bridget, daughter of Chalmers of Balbaithan,
+   Keithhall, and that estate was for some time in the name of Balfour.
+   His son, James Balfour of Balbaithan, Merchant and Magistrate of
+   Edinburgh, paid poll-tax in 1696, but by 1699 the land had been sold.
+   This was probably due to the fact that Balfour was one of the
+   Governors of the Darien Company.  His grandson, James Balfour of
+   Pilrig (1705-1795), sometime Professor of Moral Philosophy in
+   Edinburgh University, whose portrait is sketched in _Catriona_, also
+   made a Garioch [Aberdeenshire district] marriage, his wife being
+   Cecilia, fifth daughter of Sir John Elphinstone, second baronet of
+   Logie (Elphinstone) and Sheriff of Aberdeen, by Mary, daughter of Sir
+   Gilbert Elliot, first baronet of Minto.
+
+   "Referring to the Minto descent, Stevenson claims to have 'shaken a
+   spear in the Debatable Land and shouted the slogan of the Elliots.'  He
+   evidently knew little or nothing of his relations on the Elphinstone
+   side.  The Logie Elphinstones were a cadet branch of Glack, an estate
+   acquired by Nicholas Elphinstone in 1499.  William Elphinstone, a
+   younger son of James of Glack, and Elizabeth Wood of Bonnyton, married
+   Margaret Forbes, and was father of Sir James Elphinstone, Bart., of
+   Logie, so created in 1701. . . .
+
+   "Stevenson would have been delighted to acknowledge his relationship,
+   remote though it was, to 'the Wolf of Badenoch,' who burned Elgin
+   Cathedral without the Earl of Kildare's excuse that he thought the
+   Bishop was in it; and to the Wolf's son, the Victor of Harlaw [and] to
+   his nephew 'John O'Coull,' Constable of France. . . . Also among
+   Tusitala's kin may be noted, in addition to the later Gordons of
+   Gight, the Tiger Earl of Crawford, familiarly known as 'Earl Beardie,'
+   the 'Wicked Master' of the same line, who was fatally stabbed by a
+   Dundee cobbler 'for taking a stoup of drink from him'; Lady Jean
+   Lindsay, who ran away with 'a common jockey with the horn,' and
+   latterly became a beggar; David Lindsay, the last Laird of Edzell [a
+   lichtsome Lindsay fallen on evil days], who ended his days as hostler
+   at a Kirkwall inn, and 'Mussel Mou'ed Charlie,' the Jacobite ballad-
+   singer.
+
+   "Stevenson always believed that he had a strong spiritual affinity to
+   Robert Fergusson.  It is more than probable that there was a distant
+   maternal affinity as well.  Margaret Forbes, the mother of Sir James
+   Elphinstone, the purchaser of Logie, has not been identified, but it
+   is probable she was of the branch of the Tolquhon Forbeses who
+   previously owned Logie.  Fergusson's mother, Elizabeth Forbes, was the
+   daughter of a Kildrummy tacksman, who by constant tradition is stated
+   to have been of the house of Tolquhon.  It would certainly be
+   interesting if this suggested connection could be proved." {5}
+
+   "From his Highland ancestors," says the _Quarterly Review_, "Louis
+   drew the strain of Celtic melancholy with all its perils and
+   possibilities, and its kinship, to the mood of day-dreaming, which has
+   flung over so many of his pages now the vivid light wherein figures
+   imagined grew as real as flesh and blood, and yet, again, the ghostly,
+   strange, lonesome, and stinging mist under whose spell we see the
+   world bewitched, and every object quickens with a throb of infectious
+   terror."
+
+Here, as in many other cases, we see how the traits of ancestry reappear
+and transform other strains, strangely the more remote often being the
+strongest and most persistent and wonderful.
+
+"It is through his father, strange as it may seem," says Mr Baildon,
+"that Stevenson gets the Celtic elements so marked in his person,
+character, and genius; for his father's pedigree runs back to the
+Highland clan Macgregor, the kin of Rob Roy.  Stevenson thus drew in
+Celtic strains from both sides--from the Balfours and the Stevensons
+alike--and in his strange, dreamy, beautiful, and often far-removed
+fancies we have the finest and most effective witness of it."
+
+Mr William Archer, in his own characteristic way, has brought the
+inheritances from the two sides of the house into more direct contact and
+contrast in an article he wrote in _The Daily Chronicle_ on the
+appearance of the _Letters to Family and Friends_.
+
+   "These letters show," he says, "that Stevenson's was not one of those
+   sunflower temperaments which turn by instinct, not effort, towards the
+   light, and are, as Mr Francis Thompson puts it, 'heartless and happy,
+   lackeying their god.'  The strains of his heredity were very
+   curiously, but very clearly, mingled.  It may surprise some readers to
+   find him speaking of 'the family evil, despondency,' but he spoke with
+   knowledge.  He inherited from his father not only a stern Scottish
+   intentness on the moral aspect of life ('I would rise from the dead to
+   preach'), but a marked disposition to melancholy and hypochondria.
+   From his mother, on the other hand, he derived, along with his
+   physical frailty, a resolute and cheery stoicism.  These two elements
+   in his nature fought many a hard fight, and the besieging forces from
+   without--ill-health, poverty, and at one time family dissensions--were
+   by no means without allies in the inner citadel of his soul.  His
+   spirit was courageous in the truest sense of the word: by effort and
+   conviction, not by temperamental insensibility to fear.  It is clear
+   that there was a period in his life (and that before the worst of his
+   bodily ills came upon him) when he was often within measurable
+   distance of Carlylean gloom.  He was twenty-four when he wrote thus,
+   from Swanston, to Mrs Sitwell:
+
+   "'It is warmer a bit; but my body is most decrepit, and I can just
+   manage to be cheery and tread down hypochondria under foot by work.  I
+   lead such a funny life, utterly without interest or pleasure outside
+   of my work: nothing, indeed, but work all day long, except a short
+   walk alone on the cold hills, and meals, and a couple of pipes with my
+   father in the evening.  It is surprising how it suits me, and how
+   happy I keep.'
+
+   "This is the serenity which arises, not from the absence of fuliginous
+   elements in the character, but from a potent smoke-consuming faculty,
+   and an inflexible will to use it.  Nine years later he thus admonishes
+   his backsliding parent:
+
+   "'MY DEAR MOTHER,--I give my father up.  I give him a parable: that
+   the Waverley novels are better reading for every day than the tragic
+   _Life_.  And he takes it back-side foremost, and shakes his head, and
+   is gloomier than ever.  Tell him that I give him up.  I don't want no
+   such a parent.  This is not the man for my money.  I do not call that
+   by the name of religion which fills a man with bile.  I write him a
+   whole letter, bidding him beware of extremes, and telling him that his
+   gloom is gallows-worthy; and I get back an answer--.  Perish the
+   thought of it.
+
+   "'Here am I on the threshold of another year, when, according to all
+   human foresight, I should long ago have been resolved into my
+   elements: here am I, who you were persuaded was born to disgrace
+   you--and, I will do you the justice to add, on no such insufficient
+   grounds--no very burning discredit when all is done; here am I
+   married, and the marriage recognised to be a blessing of the first
+   order.  A1 at Lloyd's.  There is he, at his not first youth, able to
+   take more exercise than I at thirty-three, and gaining a stone's
+   weight, a thing of which I am incapable.  There are you; has the man
+   no gratitude? . . .
+
+   "'Even the Shorter Catechism, not the merriest epitome of religion,
+   and a work exactly as pious although not quite so true as the
+   multiplication table--even that dry-as-dust epitome begins with a
+   heroic note.  What is man's chief end?  Let him study that; and ask
+   himself if to refuse to enjoy God's kindest gifts is in the spirit
+   indicated.'
+
+   "As may be judged from this half-playful, half-serious remonstrance,
+   Stevenson's relation to his parents was eminently human and beautiful.
+   The family dissensions above alluded to belonged only to a short but
+   painful period, when the father could not reconcile himself to the
+   discovery that the son had ceased to accept the formulas of Scottish
+   Calvinism.  In the eyes of the older man such heterodoxy was for the
+   moment indistinguishable from atheism; but he soon arrived at a better
+   understanding of his son's position.  Nothing appears more
+   unmistakably in these letters than the ingrained theism of Stevenson's
+   way of thought.  The poet, the romancer within him, revolted from the
+   conception of formless force.  A personal deity was a necessary
+   character in the drama, as he conceived it.  And his morality, though
+   (or inasmuch as) it dwelt more on positive kindness than on negative
+   lawlessness, was, as he often insisted, very much akin to the morality
+   of the New Testament."
+
+Anyway it is clear that much in the interminglings of blood we _can_
+trace, may go to account for not a little in Stevenson.  His peculiar
+interest in the enormities of old-time feuds, the excesses, the
+jealousies, the queer psychological puzzles, the desire to work on the
+outlying and morbid, and even the unallowed and unhallowed, for purposes
+of romance--the delight in dealing with revelations of primitive feeling
+and the out-bursts of the mere natural man always strangely checked and
+diverted by the uprise of other tendencies to the dreamy, impalpable,
+vague, weird and horrible.  There was the undoubted Celtic element in him
+underlying what seemed foreign to it, the disregard of conventionality in
+one phase, and the falling under it in another--the reaction and the
+retreat from what had attracted and interested him, and then the return
+upon it, as with added zest because of the retreat.  The confessed
+Hedonist, enjoying life and boasting of it just a little, and yet the
+Puritan in him, as it were, all the time eyeing himself as from some
+loophole of retreat, and then commenting on his own behaviour as a
+Hedonist and Bohemian.  This clearly was not what most struck Beerbohm
+Tree, during the time he was in close contact with Stevenson, while
+arranging the production of _Beau Austin_ at the Haymarket Theatre, for
+he sees, or confesses to seeing, only one side, and that the most
+assertive, and in a sense, unreal one:
+
+   "Stevenson," says Mr Tree, "always seemed to me an epicure in life.  He
+   was always intent on extracting the last drop of honey from every
+   flower that came in his way.  He was absorbed in the business of the
+   moment, however trivial.  As a companion, he was delightfully witty;
+   as a personality, as much a creature of romance as his own creations."
+
+This is simple, and it looks sincere; but it does not touch 'tother side,
+or hint at, not to say, solve the problem of Stevenson's personality.  Had
+he been the mere Hedonist he could never have done the work he did.  Mr
+Beerbohm Tree certainly did not there see far or all round.
+
+Miss Simpson says:
+
+   "Mr Henley recalls him to Edinburgh folk as he was and as the true
+   Stevenson would have wished to be known--a queer, inexplicable
+   creature, his Celtic blood showing like a vein of unknown metal in the
+   stolid, steady rock of his sure-founded Stevensonian pedigree.  His
+   cousin and model, 'Bob' Stevenson, the art critic, showed that this
+   foreign element came from the men who lit our guiding lights for
+   seamen, not from the gentle-blooded Balfours.
+
+   "Mr Henley is right in saying that the gifted boy had not much humour.
+   When the joke was against himself he was very thin-skinned and had a
+   want of balance.  This made him feel his honest father's sensible
+   remarks like the sting of a whip."
+
+Miss Simpson then proceeds to say:
+
+   "The R. L. Stevenson of old Edinburgh days was a conceited,
+   egotistical youth, but a true and honest one: a youth full of fire and
+   sentiment, protesting he was misunderstood, though he was not.  Posing
+   as 'Velvet Coat' among the slums, he did no good to himself.  He had
+   not the Dickens aptitude for depicting the ways of life of his adopted
+   friends.  When with refined judgment he wanted a figure for a novel,
+   he went back to the Bar he scorned in his callow days and then drew in
+   _Weir of Hermiston_."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--TRAVELS
+
+
+His interest in engineering soon went--his mind full of stories and
+fancies and human nature.  As he had told his mother: he did not care
+about finding what was "the strain on a bridge," he wanted to know
+something of human beings.
+
+No doubt, much to the disappointment and grief of his father, who wished
+him as an only son to carry on the traditions of the family, though he
+had written two engineering essays of utmost promise, the engineering was
+given up, and he consented to study law.  He had already contributed to
+College Magazines, and had had even a short spell of editing one; of one
+of these he has given a racy account.  Very soon after his call to the
+Bar articles and essays from his pen began to appear in _Macmillan's_,
+and later, more regularly in the _Cornhill_.  Careful readers soon began
+to note here the presence of a new force.  He had gone on the _Inland
+Voyage_ and an account of it was in hand; and had done that tour in the
+Cevennes which he has described under the title _Travels with a Donkey in
+the Cevennes_, with Modestine, sometimes doubting which was the donkey,
+but on that tour a chill caught either developed a germ of lung disease
+already present, or produced it; and the results unfortunately remained.
+
+He never practised at the Bar, though he tells facetiously of his one
+brief.  He had chosen his own vocation, which was literature, and the
+years which followed were, despite the delicacy which showed itself, very
+busy years.  He produced volume on volume.  He had written many stories
+which had never seen the light, but, as he says, passed through the
+ordeal of the fire by more or less circuitous ways.
+
+By this time some trouble and cause for anxiety had arisen about the
+lungs, and trials of various places had been made.  _Ordered South_
+suggests the Mediterranean, sunny Italy, the Riviera.  Then a sea-trip to
+America was recommended and undertaken.  Unfortunately, he got worse
+there, his original cause of trouble was complicated with others, and the
+medical treatment given was stupid, and exaggerated some of the symptoms
+instead of removing them, All along--up, at all events, to the time of
+his settlement in Samoa--Stevenson was more or less of an invalid.
+
+Indeed, were I ever to write an essay on the art of wisely "laying-to,"
+as the sailors say, I would point it by a reference to R. L. Stevenson.
+For there is a wise way of "laying-to" that does not imply inaction, but
+discreet, well-directed effort, against contrary winds and rough seas,
+that is, amid obstacles and drawbacks, and even ill-health, where passive
+and active may balance and give effect to each other.  Stevenson was by
+native instinct and temperament a rover--a lover of adventure, of strange
+by-ways, errant tracts (as seen in his _Inland Voyage_ and _Travels with
+a Donkey through the Cevennes_--seen yet more, perhaps, in a certain
+account of a voyage to America as a steerage passenger), lofty mountain-
+tops, with stronger air, and strange and novel surroundings.  He would
+fain, like Ulysses, be at home in foreign lands, making acquaintance with
+outlying races, with
+
+            "Cities of men,
+   And manners, climates, councils, governments:
+   Myself not least, but honoured of them all,
+   Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy."
+
+If he could not move about as he would, he would invent, make fancy serve
+him instead of experience.  We thus owe something to the staying and
+restraining forces in him, and a wise "laying-to"--for his works, which
+are, in large part, finely-healthy, objective, and in almost everything
+unlike the work of an invalid, yet, in some degree, were but the devices
+to beguile the burdens of an invalid's days.  Instead of remaining in our
+climate, it might be, to lie listless and helpless half the day, with no
+companion but his own thoughts and fancies (not always so pleasant
+either, if, like Frankenstein's monster, or, better still like the imp in
+the bottle in the _Arabian Nights_, you cannot, once for all liberate
+them, and set them adrift on their own charges to visit other people), he
+made a home in the sweeter air and more steady climate of the South
+Pacific, where, under the Southern Cross, he could safely and
+beneficially be as active as he would be involuntarily idle at home, or
+work only under pressure of hampering conditions.  That was surely an
+illustration of the true "laying-to" with an unaffectedly brave, bright
+resolution in it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--SOME EARLIER LETTERS
+
+
+Carlyle was wont to say that, next to a faithful portrait, familiar
+letters were the best medium to reveal a man.  The letters must have been
+written with no idea of being used for this end, however--free, artless,
+the unstudied self-revealings of mind and heart.  Now, these letters of
+R. L. Stevenson, written to his friends in England, have a vast value in
+this way--they reveal the man--reveal him in his strength and his
+weakness--his ready gift in pleasing and adapting himself to those with
+whom he corresponded, and his great power at once of adapting himself to
+his circumstances and of humorously rising superior to them.  When he was
+ill and almost penniless in San Francisco, he could give Mr Colvin this
+account of his daily routine:
+
+   "Any time between eight and half-past nine in the morning a slender
+   gentleman in an ulster, with a volume buttoned into the breast of it,
+   maybe observed leaving No. 608 Bush and descending Powell with an
+   active step.  The gentleman is R. L. Stevenson; the volume relates to
+   Benjamin Franklin, on whom he meditates one of his charming essays.  He
+   descends Powell, crosses Market, and descends in Sixth on a branch of
+   the original Pine Street Coffee-House, no less. . . . He seats himself
+   at a table covered with waxcloth, and a pampered menial of High-Dutch
+   extraction, and, indeed, as yet only partially extracted, lays before
+   him a cup of coffee, a roll, and a pat of butter, all, to quote the
+   deity, very good.  A while ago, and R. L. Stevenson used to find the
+   supply of butter insufficient; but he has now learned the art to
+   exactitude, and butter and roll expire at the same moment.  For this
+   rejection he pays ten cents, or fivepence sterling (0 pounds 0s. 5d.).
+
+   "Half an hour later, the inhabitants of Bush Street observed the same
+   slender gentleman armed, like George Washington, with his little
+   hatchet, splitting kindling, and breaking coal for his fire.  He does
+   this quasi-publicly upon the window-sill; but this is not to be
+   attributed to any love of notoriety, though he is indeed vain of his
+   prowess with the hatchet (which he persists in calling an axe), and
+   daily surprised at the perpetuation of his fingers.  The reason is
+   this: That the sill is a strong supporting beam, and that blows of the
+   same emphasis in other parts of his room might knock the entire shanty
+   into hell.  Thenceforth, for from three hours, he is engaged darkly
+   with an ink-bottle.  Yet he is not blacking his boots, for the only
+   pair that he possesses are innocent of lustre, and wear the natural
+   hue of the material turned up with caked and venerable slush.  The
+   youngest child of his landlady remarks several times a day, as this
+   strange occupant enters or quits the house, 'Dere's de author.'  Can
+   it be that this bright-haired innocent has found the true clue to the
+   mystery?  The being in question is, at least, poor enough to belong to
+   that honourable craft."
+
+Here are a few letters belonging to the winter of 1887-88, nearly all
+written from Saranac Lake, in the Adirondacks, celebrated by Emerson, and
+now a most popular holiday resort in the United States, and were
+originally published in _Scribner's Magazine_. . . "It should be said
+that, after his long spell of weakness at Bournemouth, Stevenson had gone
+West in search of health among the bleak hill summits--'on the Canadian
+border of New York State, very unsettled and primitive and cold.'  He had
+made the voyage in an ocean tramp, the _Ludgate Hill_, the sort of craft
+which any person not a born child of the sea would shun in horror.
+Stevenson, however, had 'the finest time conceivable on board the
+"strange floating menagerie."'"  Thus he describes it in a letter to Mr
+Henry James:
+
+   "Stallions and monkeys and matches made our cargo; and the vast
+   continent of these incongruities rolled the while like a haystack; and
+   the stallions stood hypnotised by the motion, looking through the port
+   at our dinner-table, and winked when the crockery was broken; and the
+   little monkeys stared at each other in their cages, and were thrown
+   overboard like little bluish babies; and the big monkey, Jacko,
+   scoured about the ship and rested willingly in my arms, to the ruin of
+   my clothing; and the man of the stallions made a bower of the black
+   tarpaulin, and sat therein at the feet of a raddled divinity, like a
+   picture on a box of chocolates; and the other passengers, when they
+   were not sick, looked on and laughed.  Take all this picture, and make
+   it roll till the bell shall sound unexpected notes and the fittings
+   shall break loose in our stateroom, and you have the voyage of the
+   _Ludgate Hill_.  She arrived in the port of New York without beer,
+   porter, soda-water, curacoa, fresh meat, or fresh water; and yet we
+   lived, and we regret her."
+
+He discovered this that there is no joy in the Universe comparable to
+life on a villainous ocean tramp, rolling through a horrible sea in
+company with a cargo of cattle.
+
+   "I have got one good thing of my sea voyage; it is proved the sea
+   agrees heartily with me, and my mother likes it; so if I get any
+   better, or no worse, my mother will likely hire a yacht for a month or
+   so in the summer.  Good Lord! what fun!  Wealth is only useful for two
+   things: a yacht and a string quartette.  For these two I will sell my
+   soul.  Except for these I hold that 700 pounds a year is as much as
+   anybody can possibly want; and I have had more, so I know, for the
+   extra coins were of no use, excepting for illness, which damns
+   everything.  I was so happy on board that ship, I could not have
+   believed it possible; we had the beastliest weather, and many
+   discomforts; but the mere fact of its being a tramp ship gave us many
+   comforts.  We could cut about with the men and officers, stay in the
+   wheel-house, discuss all manner of things, and really be a little at
+   sea.  And truly there is nothing else.  I had literally forgotten what
+   happiness was, and the full mind--full of external and physical
+   things, not full of cares and labours, and rot about a fellow's
+   behaviour.  My heart literally sang; I truly care for nothing so much
+   as for that.
+
+   "To go ashore for your letters and hang about the pier among the
+   holiday yachtsmen--that's fame, that's glory--and nobody can take it
+   away."
+
+At Saranac Lake the Stevensons lived in a "wind-beleaguered hill-top hat-
+box of a house," which suited the invalid, but, on the other hand,
+invalided his wife.  Soon after getting there he plunged into _The Master
+of Ballantrae_.
+
+   "No thought have I now apart from it, and I have got along up to page
+   ninety-two of the draught with great interest.  It is to me a most
+   seizing tale: there are some fantastic elements, the most is a dead
+   genuine human problem--human tragedy, I should say rather.  It will be
+   about as long, I imagine, as _Kidnapped_. . . . I have done most of
+   the big work, the quarrel, duel between the brothers, and the
+   announcement of the death to Clementina and my Lord--Clementina,
+   Henry, and Mackellar (nicknamed Squaretoes) are really very fine
+   fellows; the Master is all I know of the devil; I have known hints of
+   him, in the world, but always cowards: he is as bold as a lion, but
+   with the same deadly, causeless duplicity I have watched with so much
+   surprise in my two cowards.  'Tis true, I saw a hint of the same
+   nature in another man who was not a coward; but he had other things to
+   attend to; the Master has nothing else but his devilry."
+
+His wife grows seriously ill, and Stevenson has to turn to household
+work.
+
+   "Lloyd and I get breakfast; I have now, 10.15, just got the dishes
+   washed and the kitchen all clean, and sit down to give you as much
+   news as I have spirit for, after such an engagement.  Glass is a thing
+   that really breaks my spirit; and I do not like to fail, and with
+   glass I cannot reach the work of my high calling--the artist's."
+
+In the midst of such domestic tasks and entanglements he writes _The
+Master_, and very characteristically gets dissatisfied with the last
+parts, "which shame, perhaps degrade, the beginning."
+
+Of Mr Kipling this is his judgment--in the year 1890:
+
+   "Kipling is by far the most promising young man who has appeared
+   since--ahem--I appeared.  He amazes me by his precocity and various
+   endowments.  But he alarms me by his copiousness and haste.  He should
+   shield his fire with both hands, 'and draw up all his strength and
+   sweetness in one ball.'  ('Draw all his strength and all his sweetness
+   up into one ball'?  I cannot remember Marvell's words.)  So the
+   critics have been saying to me; but I was never capable of--and surely
+   never guilty of--such a debauch of production.  At this rate his works
+   will soon fill the habitable globe, and surely he was armed for better
+   conflicts than these succinct sketches and flying leaves of verse?  I
+   look on, I admire, I rejoice for myself; but in a kind of ambition we
+   all have for our tongue and literature I am wounded.  If I had this
+   man's fertility and courage, it seems to me I could heave a pyramid.
+
+   "Well, we begin to be the old fogies now, and it was high time
+   _something_ rose to take our places.  Certainly Kipling has the gifts;
+   the fairy godmothers were all tipsy at his christening.  What will he
+   do with them?"
+
+Of the rest of Stevenson's career we cannot speak at length, nor is it
+needful.  How in steady succession came his triumphs: came, too, his
+trials from ill-health--how he spent winters at Davos Platz, Bournemouth,
+and tried other places in America; and how, at last, good fortune led him
+to the South Pacific.  After many voyagings and wanderings among the
+islands, he settled near Apia, in Samoa, early in 1890, cleared some four
+hundred acres, and built a house; where, while he wrote what delighted
+the English-speaking race, he took on himself the defence of the natives
+against foreign interlopers, writing under the title _A Footnote to
+History_, the most powerful _expose_ of the mischief they had done and
+were doing there.  He was the beloved of the natives, as he made himself
+the friend of all with whom he came in contact.  There, as at home, he
+worked--worked with the same determination and in the enjoyment of better
+health.  The obtaining idea with him, up to the end, as it had been from
+early life, was a brave, resolute, cheerful endeavour to make the best of
+it.
+
+"I chose Samoa instead of Honolulu," he told Mr W. H. Trigg, who reports
+the talk in _Cassells' Magazine_, "for the simple and eminently
+satisfactory reason that it is less civilised.  Can you not conceive that
+it is awful fun?"  His house was called "Vailima," which means Five
+Waters in the Samoan, and indicates the number of streams that flow by
+the spot.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII--THE VAILIMA LETTERS
+
+
+The Vailima Letters, written to Mr Sidney Colvin and other friends, are
+in their way delightful if not inimitable: and this, in spite of the idea
+having occurred to him, that some use might hereafter be made of these
+letters for publication purposes.  There is, indeed, as little trace of
+any change in the style through this as well could be--the utterly
+familiar, easy, almost child-like flow remains, unmarred by
+self-consciousness or tendency "to put it on."
+
+In June, 1892, Stevenson says:
+
+   "It came over me the other day suddenly that this diary of mine to you
+   would make good pickings after I am dead, and a man could make some
+   kind of a book out of it, without much trouble.  So for God's sake
+   don't lose them, and they will prove a piece of provision for 'my
+   floor old family,' as Simele calls it."
+
+But their great charm remains: they are as free and gracious and serious
+and playful and informal as before.  Stevenson's traits of character are
+all here: his largeness of heart, his delicacy, his sympathy, his fun,
+his pathos, his boylike frolicsomeness, his fine courage, his love of the
+sea (for he was by nature a sailor), his passion for action and adventure
+despite his ill-health, his great patience with others and fine
+adaptability to their temper (he says that he never gets out of temper
+with those he has to do with), his unbounded, big-hearted hopefulness,
+and fine perseverance in face of difficulties.  What could be better than
+the way in which he tells that in January, 1892, when he had a bout of
+influenza and was dictating _St Ives_ to his stepdaughter, Mrs Strong, he
+was "reduced to dictating to her in the deaf-and-dumb alphabet"?--and
+goes on:
+
+   "The amanuensis has her head quite turned, and believes herself to be
+   the author of this novel [_and is to some extent_.--A.M.] and as the
+   creature (!) has not been wholly useless in the matter [_I told you
+   so_!--A.M.] I propose to foster her vanity by a little commemoration
+   gift! . . . I shall tell you on some other occasion, and when the A.M.
+   is out of hearing, how _very_ much I propose to invest in this
+   testimonial; but I may as well inform you at once that I intend it to
+   be cheap, sir--damned cheap!  My idea of running amanuenses is by
+   praise, not pudding, flattery, and not coins."
+
+Truly, a rare and rich nature which could thus draw sunshine out of its
+trials!--which, by aid of the true philosopher's stone of cheerfulness
+and courage, could transmute the heavy dust and clay to gold.
+
+His interests are so wide that he is sometimes pulled in different and
+conflicting directions, as in the contest between his desire to aid
+Mataafa and the other chiefs, and his literary work--between letters to
+the _Times_ about Samoan politics, and, say, _David Balfour_.  Here is a
+characteristic bit in that strain:
+
+   "I have a good dose of the devil in my pipestem atomy; I have had my
+   little holiday outing in my kick at _The Young Chevalier_, and I guess
+   I can settle to _David Balfour_, to-morrow or Friday like a little
+   man.  I wonder if any one had ever more energy upon so little
+   strength?  I know there is a frost; . . . but I mean to break that
+   frost inside two years, and pull off a big success, and Vanity
+   whispers in my ear that I have the strength.  If I haven't, whistle
+   owre the lave o't!  I can do without glory, and perhaps the time is
+   not far off when I can do without corn.  It is a time coming soon
+   enough, anyway; and I have endured some two and forty years without
+   public shame, and had a good time as I did it.  If only I could secure
+   a violent death, what a fine success!  I wish to die in my boots; no
+   more Land of Counterpane for me.  To be drowned, to be shot, to be
+   thrown from a horse--ay, to be hanged, rather than pass again through
+   that slow dissolution."
+
+He would not consent to act the invalid unless the spring ran down
+altogether; was keen for exercise and for mixing among men--his native
+servants if no others were near by.  Here is a bit of confession and
+casuistry quite _a la_ Stevenson:
+
+   "To come down covered with mud and drenched with sweat and rain after
+   some hours in the bush, change, rub down, and take a chair in the
+   verandah, is to taste a quiet conscience.  And the strange thing that
+   I mark is this: If I go out and make sixpence, bossing my labourers
+   and plying the cutlass or the spade, idiot conscience applauds me; if
+   I sit in the house and make twenty pounds, idiot conscience wails over
+   my neglect and the day wasted."
+
+His relish for companionship is indeed strong.  At one place he says:
+
+   "God knows I don't care who I chum with perhaps I like sailors best,
+   but to go round and sue and sneak to keep a crowd together--never!"
+
+If Stevenson's natural bent was to be an explorer, a mountain-climber, or
+a sailor--to sail wide seas, or to range on mountain-tops to gain free
+and extensive views--yet he inclines well to farmer work, and indeed, has
+to confess it has a rare attraction for him.
+
+   "I went crazy over outdoor work," he says at one place, "and had at
+   last to confine myself to the house, or literature must have gone by
+   the board.  _Nothing_ is so interesting as weeding, clearing, and path-
+   making: the oversight of labourers becomes a disease.  It is quite an
+   effort not to drop into the farmer; and it does make you feel so
+   well."
+
+The odd ways of these Samoans, their pride of position, their vices,
+their virtues, their vanities, their small thefts, their tricks, their
+delightful _insouciance_ sometimes, all amused him.  He found in them a
+fine field of study and observation--a source of fun and fund of
+humanity--as this bit about the theft of some piglings will sufficiently
+prove:
+
+   "Last night three piglings were stolen from one of our pig-pens.  The
+   great Lafaele appeared to my wife uneasy, so she engaged him in
+   conversation on the subject, and played upon him the following
+   engaging trick: You advance your two forefingers towards the sitter's
+   eyes; he closes them, whereupon you substitute (on his eyelids) the
+   fore and middle fingers of the left hand, and with your right (which
+   he supposes engaged) you tap him on the head and back.  When you let
+   him open his eyes, he sees you withdrawing the two forefingers.  'What
+   that?' asked Lafaele.  'My devil,' says Fanny.  'I wake um, my devil.
+   All right now.  He go catch the man that catch my pig.'  About an hour
+   afterwards Lafaele came for further particulars.  'Oh, all right,' my
+   wife says.  'By-and-by that man be sleep, devil go sleep same place.
+   By-and-by that man plenty sick.  I no care.  What for he take my pig?'
+   Lafaele cares plenty; I don't think he is the man, though he may be;
+   but he knows him, and most likely will eat some of that pig to-night.
+   He will not eat with relish.'"
+
+Yet in spite of this R. L. Stevenson declares that:
+
+   "They are a perfectly honest people: nothing of value has ever been
+   taken from our house, where doors and windows are always wide open;
+   and upon one occasion when white ants attacked the silver chest, the
+   whole of my family treasure lay spread upon the floor of the hall for
+   two days unguarded."
+
+Here is a bit on a work of peace, a reflection on a day's weeding at
+Vailima--in its way almost as touching as any:
+
+   "I wonder if any one had ever the same attitude to Nature as I hold,
+   and have held for so long?  This business fascinates me like a tune or
+   a passion; yet all the while I thrill with a strong distaste.  The
+   horror of the thing, objective and subjective, is always present to my
+   mind; the horror of creeping things, a superstitious horror of the
+   void and the powers about me, the horror of my own devastation and
+   continual murders.  The life of the plants comes through my finger-
+   tips, their struggles go to my heart like supplications.  I feel
+   myself blood-boltered; then I look back on my cleared grass, and count
+   myself an ally in a fair quarrel, and make stout my heart."
+
+Here, again, is the way in which he celebrates an act of friendly
+kindness on the part of Mr Gosse:
+
+   "MY DEAR GOSSE,--Your letter was to me such a bright spot that I
+   answer it right away to the prejudice of other correspondents or--dants
+   (don't know how to spell it) who have prior claims. . . . It is the
+   history of our kindnesses that alone makes this world tolerable.  If
+   it were not for that, for the effect of kind words, kind looks, kind
+   letters, multiplying, spreading, making one happy through another and
+   bringing forth benefits, some thirty, some fifty, some a thousandfold,
+   I should be tempted to think our life a practical jest in the worst
+   possible spirit.  So your four pages have confirmed my philosophy as
+   well as consoled my heart in these ill hours."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII--WORK OF LATER YEARS
+
+
+Mr Hammerton, in his _Stevensoniana_ (pp. 323-4), has given the humorous
+inscriptions on the volumes of his works which Stevenson presented to Dr
+Trudeau, who attended him when he was in Saranac in 1887-88--very
+characteristic in every way, and showing fully Stevenson's fine
+appreciation of any attention or service.  On the _Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_
+volume he wrote:
+
+   "Trudeau was all the winter at my side:
+   I never saw the nose of Mr Hyde."
+
+And on _Kidnapped_ is this:
+
+   "Here is the one sound page of all my writing,
+   The one I'm proud of and that I delight in."
+
+Stevenson was exquisite in this class of efforts, and were they all
+collected they would form indeed, a fine supplement and illustration of
+the leading lesson of his essays--the true art of pleasing others, and of
+truly pleasing one's self at the same time.  To my thinking the finest of
+all in this line is the legal (?) deed by which he conveyed his birthday
+to little Miss Annie Ide, the daughter of Mr H. C. Ide, a well-known
+American, who was for several years a resident of Upolo, in Samoa, first
+as Land Commissioner, and later as Chief Justice under the joint
+appointment of England, Germany, and the United States.  While living at
+Apia, Mr Ide and his family were very intimate with the family of R. L.
+Stevenson.  Little Annie was a special pet and protege of Stevenson and
+his wife.  After the return of the Ides to their American home, Stevenson
+"deeded" to Annie his birthday in the following unique document:
+
+   I, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, advocate of the Scots Bar, author of _The
+   Master of Ballantrae_ and _Moral Emblems_, civil engineer, sole owner
+   and patentee of the palace and plantation known as Vailima, in the
+   island of Upolo, Samoa, a British subject, being in sound mind, and
+   pretty well, I thank you, in mind and body;
+
+   In consideration that Miss Annie H. Ide, daughter of H. C. Ide, in the
+   town of Saint Johnsbury, in the County of Caledonia, in the State of
+   Vermont, United States of America, was born, out of all reason, upon
+   Christmas Day, and is, therefore, out of all justice, denied the
+   consolation and profit of a proper birthday;
+
+   And considering that I, the said Robert Louis Stevenson, have attained
+   the age when we never mention it, and that I have now no further use
+   for a birthday of any description;
+
+   And in consideration that I have met H. C. Ide, the father of the said
+   Annie H. Ide, and found him as white a land commissioner as I require,
+   I have transferred, and do hereby transfer, to the said Annie H. Ide,
+   all and whole of my rights and privileges in the 13th day of November,
+   formerly my birthday, now, hereby and henceforth, the birthday of the
+   said Annie H. Ide, to have, hold, exercise, and enjoy the same in the
+   customary manner, by the sporting of fine raiment, eating of rich
+   meats, and receipt of gifts, compliments, and copies of verse,
+   according to the manner of our ancestors;
+
+   And I direct the said Annie H. Ide to add to the said name of Annie H.
+   Ide the name of Louisa--at least in private--and I charge her to use
+   my said birthday with moderation and humanity, _et tamquam bona filia
+   familias_, the said birthday not being so young as it once was and
+   having carried me in a very satisfactory manner since I can remember;
+
+   And in case the said Annie H. Ide shall neglect or contravene either
+   of the above conditions, I hereby revoke the donation and transfer my
+   rights in the said birthday to the President of the United States of
+   America for the time being.
+
+   In witness whereof I have hereto set my hand and seal this 19th day of
+   June, in the year of grace eighteen hundred and ninety-one.
+
+   ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. [Seal.]
+
+   _Witness_, LLOYD OSBOURNE.
+
+   _Witness_, HAROLD WATTS.
+
+He died in Samoa in December 1894--not from phthisis or anything directly
+connected with it, but from the bursting of a blood-vessel and suffusion
+of blood on the brain.  He had up to the moment almost of his sudden and
+unexpected death been busy on _Weir of Hermiston_ and _St Ives_, which he
+left unfinished--the latter having been brought to a conclusion by Mr
+Quiller-Couch.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX--SOME CHARACTERISTICS
+
+
+In Stevenson we lost one of the most powerful writers of our day, as well
+as the most varied in theme and style.  When I use the word "powerful," I
+do not mean merely the producing of the most striking or sensational
+results, nor the facility of weaving a fascinating or blood-curdling
+plot; I mean the writer who seemed always to have most in reserve--a
+secret fund of power and fascination which always pointed beyond the
+printed page, and set before the attentive and careful reader a strange
+but fascinating _personality_.  Other authors have done that in measure.
+There was Hawthorne, behind whose writings there is always the wistful,
+cold, far-withdrawn spectator of human nature--eerie, inquisitive, and, I
+had almost said, inquisitorial--a little bloodless, eerie, weird, and
+cobwebby.  There was Dr Wendell Holmes, with his problems of heredity, of
+race-mixture and weird inoculation, as in _Elsie Venner_ and _The
+Guardian Angel_, and there were Poe and Charles Whitehead.  Stevenson, in
+a few of his writings--in one of the _Merry Men_ chapters and in _Dr
+Jekyll and Mr Hyde_, and, to some extent, in _The Master of
+Ballantrae_--showed that he could enter on the obscure and, in a sense,
+weird and metaphysical elements in human life; though always there was,
+too, a touch at least of gloomy suggestion, from which, as it seemed, he
+could not there wholly escape.  But always, too, there was a touch that
+suggests the universal.
+
+Even in the stories that would be classed as those of incident and
+adventure merely, _Treasure Island_, _Kidnapped_, and the rest, there is
+a sense as of some unaffected but fine symbolism that somehow touches
+something of possibility in yourself as you read.  The simplest narrative
+from his hand proclaimed itself a deep study in human nature--its motives
+tendencies, and possibilities.  In these stories there is promise at once
+of the most realistic imagination, the most fantastic romance, keen
+insights into some sides of human nature, and weird fancies, as well as
+the most delicate and dainty pictures of character.  And this is
+precisely what we have--always with a vein of the finest autobiography--a
+kind of select and indirect self-revelation--often with a touch of
+quaintness, a subdued humour, and sweet-blooded vagary, if we may be
+allowed the word, which make you feel towards the writer as towards a
+friend.  He was too much an artist to overdo this, and his strength lies
+there, that generally he suggests and turns away at the right point, with
+a smile, as you ask for _more_.  Look how he sets, half slyly, these
+words into the mouth of David Balfour on his first meeting with Catriona
+in one of the steep wynds or closes off the High Street of Edinburgh:
+
+   "There is no greater wonder than the way the face of a young woman
+   fits in a man's mind, and stays there, and he never could tell you
+   why: it just seems it was the thing he wanted."
+
+Take this alongside of his remark made to his mother while still a
+youth--"that he did not care to understand the strain on a bridge" (when
+he tried to study engineering); what he wanted was something with human
+nature in it.  His style, in his essays, etc., where he writes in his own
+person, is most polished, full of phrases finely drawn; when he speaks
+through others, as in _Kidnapped_ and _David Balfour_, it is still fine
+and effective, and generally it is fairly true to the character, with
+cunning glimpses, nevertheless, of his own temper and feeling too.  He
+makes us feel his confidants and friends, as has been said.  One could
+almost construct a biography from his essays and his novels--the one
+would give us the facts of his life suffused with fancy and ideal colour,
+humour and fine observation not wanting; the other would give us the
+history of his mental and moral being and development, and of the traits
+and determinations which he drew from along a lengthened line of
+progenitors.  How characteristic it is of him--a man who for so many
+years suffered as an invalid--that he should lay it down that the two
+great virtues, including all others, were cheerfulness and delight in
+labour.
+
+One writer has very well said on this feature in Stevenson:
+
+   "Other authors have struggled bravely against physical weakness, but
+   their work has not usually been of a creative order, dependent for its
+   success on high animal spirits.  They have written histories, essays,
+   contemplative or didactic poems, works which may more or less be
+   regarded as 'dull narcotics numbing pain.'  But who, in so fragile a
+   frame as Robert Louis Stevenson's, has retained such indomitable
+   elasticity, such fertility of invention, such unflagging energy, not
+   merely to collect and arrange, but to project and body forth?  Has any
+   true 'maker' been such an incessant sufferer?  From his childhood, as
+   he himself said apropos of the _Child's Garden_, he could 'speak with
+   less authority of gardens than of that other "land of counterpane."'
+   There were, indeed, a few years of adolescence during which his health
+   was tolerable, but they were years of apprenticeship to life and art
+   ('pioching,' as he called it), not of serious production.  Though he
+   was a precocious child, his genius ripened slowly, and it was just
+   reaching maturity when the 'wolverine,' as he called his disease,
+   fixed its fangs in his flesh.  From that time forward not only did he
+   live with death at his elbow in an almost literal sense (he used to
+   carry his left arm in a sling lest a too sudden movement should bring
+   on a haemorrhage), but he had ever-recurring intervals of weeks and
+   months during which he was totally unfit for work; while even at the
+   best of times he had to husband his strength most jealously.  Add to
+   all this that he was a slow and laborious writer, who would take more
+   pains with a phrase than Scott with a chapter--then look at the
+   stately shelf of his works, brimful of impulse, initiative, and the
+   joy of life, and say whether it be an exaggeration to call his
+   tenacity and fortitude unique!"
+
+Samoa, with its fine climate, prolonged his life--we had fain hoped that
+in that air he found so favourable he might have lived for many years, to
+add to the precious stock of innocent delight he has given to the
+world--to do yet more and greater.  It was not to be.  They buried him,
+with full native honours as to a chief, on the top of Vaea mountain, 1300
+feet high--a road for the coffin to pass being cut through the woods on
+the slopes of the hill.  There he has a resting-place not all unfit--for
+he sought the pure and clearer air on the heights from whence there are
+widest prospects; yet not in the spot he would have chosen--for his heart
+was at home, and not very long before his death he sang, surely with
+pathetic reference now:
+
+   "Spring shall come, come again, calling up the moorfowl,
+   Spring shall bring the sun and rain, bring the bees and flowers,
+   Red shall the heather bloom over hill and valley,
+   Soft flow the stream thro' the even-flowing hours;
+   Fair the day shine, as it shone upon my childhood--
+      Fair shine the day on the house with open door;
+   Birds come and cry there, and twitter in the chimney--
+      But I go for ever and come again no more."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X--A SAMOAN MEMORIAL OF R. L. STEVENSON
+
+
+A few weeks after his death, the mail from Samoa, brought to Stevenson's
+friends, myself among the number, a precious, if pathetic, memorial of
+the master.  It is in the form of "A Letter to Mr Stevenson's Friends,"
+by his stepson, Mr Lloyd Osbourne, and bears the motto from Walt Whitman,
+"I have been waiting for you these many years.  Give me your hand and
+welcome."  Mr Osbourne gives a full account of the last hours.
+
+   "He wrote hard all that morning of the last day; his half-finished
+   book, _Hermiston_, he judged the best he had ever written, and the
+   sense of successful effort made him buoyant and happy as nothing else
+   could.  In the afternoon the mail fell to be answered--not business
+   correspondence, for this was left till later--but replies to the long,
+   kindly letters of distant friends received but two days since, and
+   still bright in memory.  At sunset he came downstairs; rallied his
+   wife about the forebodings she could not shake off; talked of a
+   lecturing tour to America that he was eager to make, 'as he was now so
+   well'; and played a game of cards with her to drive away her
+   melancholy.  He said he was hungry; begged her assistance to help him
+   make a salad for the evening meal; and, to enhance the little feast he
+   brought up a bottle of old Burgundy from the cellar.  He was helping
+   his wife on the verandah, and gaily talking, when suddenly he put both
+   hands to his head and cried out, 'What's that?'  Then he asked
+   quickly, 'Do I look strange?'  Even as he did so he fell on his knees
+   beside her.  He was helped into the great hall, between his wife and
+   his body-servant, Sosimo, losing consciousness instantly as he lay
+   back in the armchair that had once been his grandfather's.  Little
+   time was lost in bringing the doctors--Anderson of the man-of-war, and
+   his friend, Dr Funk.  They looked at him and shook their heads; they
+   laboured strenuously, and left nothing undone.  But he had passed the
+   bounds of human skill.  He had grown so well and strong, that his
+   wasted lungs were unable to bear the stress of returning health."
+
+Then 'tis told how the Rev. Mr Clarke came and prayed by him; and how,
+soon after, the chiefs were summoned, and came, bringing their fine mats,
+which, laid on the body, almost hid the Union jack in which it had been
+wrapped.  One of the old Mataafa chiefs, who had been in prison, and who
+had been one of those who worked on the making of the "Road of the Loving
+Heart" (the road of gratitude which the chiefs had made up to Mr
+Stevenson's house as a mark of their appreciation of his efforts on their
+behalf), came and crouched beside the body and said:
+
+   "I am only a poor Samoan, and ignorant.  Others are rich, and can give
+   Tusitala {6} the parting presents of rich, fine mats; I am poor, and
+   can give nothing this last day he receives his friends.  Yet I am not
+   afraid to come and look the last time in my friend's face, never to
+   see him more till we meet with God.  Behold!  Tusitala is dead;
+   Mataafa is also dead.  These two great friends have been taken by God.
+   When Mataafa was taken, who was our support but Tusitala?  We were in
+   prison, and he cared for us.  We were sick, and he made us well.  We
+   were hungry, and he fed us.  The day was no longer than his kindness.
+   You are great people, and full of love.  Yet who among you is so great
+   as Tusitala?  What is your love to his love?  Our clan was Mataafa's
+   clan, for whom I speak this day; therein was Tusitala also.  We mourn
+   them both."
+
+A select company of Samoans would not be deterred, and watched by the
+body all night, chanting songs, with bits of Catholic prayers; and in the
+morning the work began of clearing a path through the wood on the hill to
+the spot on the crown where Mr Stevenson had expressed a wish to be
+buried.  The following prayer, which Mr Stevenson had written and read
+aloud to his family only the night before, was read by Mr Clarke in the
+service:
+
+   "We beseech thee, Lord, to behold us with favour, folk of many
+   families and nations, gathered together in the peace of this roof;
+   weak men and women, subsisting under the covert of Thy patience.  Be
+   patient still; suffer us yet a while longer--with our broken purposes
+   of good, with our idle endeavours against evil--suffer us a while
+   longer to endure, and (if it may be) help us to do better.  Bless to
+   us our extraordinary mercies; if the day come when these must be
+   taken, have us play the man under affliction.  Be with our friends; be
+   with ourselves.  Go with each of us to rest: if any awake, temper to
+   them the dark hours of watching; and when the day returns to us, our
+   Sun and Comforter, call us up with morning faces and with morning
+   hearts--eager to labour--eager to be happy, if happiness shall be our
+   portion; and if the day be marked for sorrow, strong to endure it.
+
+   "We thank Thee and praise Thee, and in the words of Him to whom this
+   day is sacred, close our oblations."
+
+Mr Bazzet M. Haggard, H.B.M., Land-Commissioner, tells, by way of
+reminiscence, the story of "The Road of Good Heart," how it came to be
+built, and of the great feast Mr Stevenson gave at the close of the work,
+at which, in the course of his speech, he said:
+
+   "You are all aware in some degree of what has happened.  You know
+   those chiefs to have been prisoners; you perhaps know that during the
+   term of their confinement I had it in my power to do them certain
+   favours.  One thing some of you cannot know, that they were
+   immediately repaid by answering attentions.  They were liberated by
+   the new Administration. . . .  As soon as they were free men--owing no
+   man anything--instead of going home to their own places and families,
+   they came to me.  They offered to do this work (to make this road) for
+   me as a free gift, without hire, without supplies, and I was tempted
+   at first to refuse their offer.  I knew the country to be poor; I knew
+   famine threatening; I knew their families long disorganised for want
+   of supervision.  Yet I accepted, because I thought the lesson of that
+   road might be more useful to Samoa than a thousand bread-fruit trees,
+   and because to myself it was an exquisite pleasure to receive that
+   which was so handsomely offered.  It is now done; you have trod it to-
+   day in coming hither.  It has been made for me by chiefs; some of them
+   old, some sick, all newly delivered from a harassing confinement, and
+   in spite of weather unusually hot and insalubrious.  I have seen these
+   chiefs labour valiantly with their own hands upon the work, and I have
+   set up over it, now that it is finished the name of 'The Road of
+   Gratitude' (the road of loving hearts), and the names of those that
+   built it.  'In perpetuam memoriam,' we say, and speak idly.  At least,
+   as long as my own life shall be spared it shall be here perpetuated;
+   partly for my pleasure and in my gratitude; partly for others
+   continually to publish the lesson of this road."
+
+And turning to the chiefs, Mr Stevenson said:
+
+   "I will tell you, chiefs, that when I saw you working on that road, my
+   heart grew warm; not with gratitude only, but with hope.  It seemed to
+   me that I read the promise of something good for Samoa; it seemed to
+   me as I looked at you that you were a company of warriors in a battle,
+   fighting for the defence of our common country against all aggression.
+   For there is a time to fight and a time to dig.  You Samoans may
+   fight, you may conquer twenty times, and thirty times, and all will be
+   in vain.  There is but one way to defend Samoa.  Hear it, before it is
+   too late.  It is to make roads and gardens, and care for your trees,
+   and sell their produce wisely; and, in one word, to occupy and use
+   your country.  If you do not, others will. . . .
+
+   "I love Samoa and her people.  I love the land.  I have chosen it to
+   be my home while I live, and my grave after I am dead, and I love the
+   people, and have chosen them to be my people, to live and die with.
+   And I see that the day is come now of the great battle; of the great
+   and the last opportunity by which it shall be decided whether you are
+   to pass away like those other races of which I have been speaking, or
+   to stand fast and have your children living on and honouring your
+   memory in the land you received of your fathers."
+
+Mr James H. Mulligan, U.S. Consul, told of the feast of Thanksgiving Day
+on the 29th November prior to Mr Stevenson's death, and how at great
+pains he had procured for it the necessary turkey, and how Mrs Stevenson
+had found a fair substitute for the pudding.  In the course of his speech
+in reply to an unexpected proposal of "The Host," Mr Stevenson said:
+
+   "There on my right sits she who has but lately from our own loved
+   native land come back to me--she to whom, with no lessening of
+   affection to those others to whom I cling, I love better than all the
+   world besides--my mother.  From the opposite end of the table, my
+   wife, who has been all in all to me, when the days were very dark,
+   looks to-night into my eyes--while we have both grown a bit older--with
+   undiminished and undiminishing affection.
+
+   "Childless, yet on either side of me sits that good woman, my
+   daughter, and the stalwart man, my son, and both have been and are
+   more than son and daughter to me, and have brought into my life mirth
+   and beauty.  Nor is this all.  There sits the bright boy dear to my
+   heart, full of the flow and the spirits of boyhood, so that I can even
+   know that for a time at least we have still the voice of a child in
+   the house."
+
+Mr A. W. Mackay gives an account of the funeral and a description of the
+burial-place, ending:
+
+   "Tofa Tusitala!  Sleep peacefully! on thy mountain-top, alone in
+   Nature's sanctity, where the wooddove's note, the moaning of the waves
+   as they break unceasingly on the distant reef, and the sighing of the
+   winds in the distant tavai trees chant their requiem."
+
+The Rev. Mr Clarke tells of the constant and active interest Mr Stevenson
+took in the missionaries and their work, often aiding them by his advice
+and fine insight into the character of the natives; and a translation
+follows of a dirge by one of the chiefs, so fine that we must give it:
+
+   I.
+
+   "Listen, O this world, as I tell of the disaster
+   That befell in the late afternoon;
+   That broke like a wave of the sea
+   Suddenly and swiftly, blinding our eyes.
+   Alas for Loia who speaks tears in his voice!
+
+   _Refrain_--Groan and weep, O my heart, in its sorrow.
+   Alas for Tusitala, who rests in the forest!
+   Aimlessly we wait, and sorrowing.  Will he again return?
+   Lament, O Vailima, waiting and ever waiting!
+   Let us search and inquire of the captain of ships,
+   'Be not angry, but has not Tusitala come?'
+
+   II.
+
+   "Teuila, sorrowing one, come thou hither!
+   Prepare me a letter, and I will carry it.
+   Let her Majesty Victoria be told
+   That Tusitala, the loving one, has been taken hence.
+
+   _Refrain_--Groan and weep, O my heart, etc., etc.
+
+   III.
+
+   "Alas! my heart weeps with anxious grief
+   As I think of the days before us:
+   Of the white men gathering for the Christmas assembly!
+   Alas for Aolele! left in her loneliness,
+   And the men of Vailima, who weep together
+   Their leader--their leader being taken.
+
+   _Refrain_--Groan and weep, O my heart, etc., etc.
+
+   IV.
+
+   "Alas! O my heart! it weeps unceasingly
+   When I think of his illness
+   Coming upon him with fatal swiftness.
+   Would that it waited a glance or a word from him,
+   Or some token, some token from us of our love.
+
+   _Refrain_--Groan and weep, O my heart, etc., etc.
+
+   V.
+
+   "Grieve, O my heart!  I cannot bear to look on
+   All the chiefs who are there now assembling:
+   Alas, Tusitala! Thou art not here!
+   I look hither and thither in vain for thee.
+
+   _Refrain_--Groan and weep, O my heart, etc., etc."
+
+And the little booklet closes with Mr Stevenson's own lines:
+
+   "REQUIEM.
+
+   Under the wide and starry sky,
+   Dig the grave and let me lie;
+   Glad did I live and gladly die,
+   And I laid me down with a will.
+   This be the verse you grave for me:
+   'Here he lies where he longed to be;
+   Home is the sailor, home from sea;
+   And the hunter home from the hill.'"
+
+Every touch tells here was a man, with heart and head, with soul and mind
+intent on the loftiest things; simple, great,
+
+   "Like one of the simple great ones gone
+   For ever and ever by.
+
+His character towered after all far above his books; great and beautiful
+though they were.  Ready for friendship; from all meanness free.  So,
+too, the Samoans felt.  This, surely, was what Goethe meant when he
+wrote:
+
+   "The clear head and stout heart,
+   However far they roam,
+   Yet in every truth have part,
+   Are everywhere at home."
+
+His manliness, his width of sympathy, his practicality, his range of
+interests were in nothing more seen than in his contributions to the
+history of Samoa, as specially exhibited in _A Footnote to History_ and
+his letters to the _Times_.  He was, on this side, in no sense a dreamer,
+but a man of acute observation and quick eye for passing events and the
+characters that were in them with sympathy equal to his discernments.  His
+portraits of certain Germans and others in these writings, and his power
+of tracing effects to remote and underlying causes, show sufficiently
+what he might have done in the field of history, had not higher voices
+called him.  His adaptation to the life in Samoa, and his assumption of
+the semi-patriarchal character in his own sphere there, were only tokens
+of the presence of the same traits as have just been dwelt on.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI--MISS STUBBS' RECORD OF A PILGRIMAGE
+
+
+Mrs Strong, in her chapter of _Table Talk in Memories of Vailima_, tells
+a story of the natives' love for Stevenson.  "The other day the cook was
+away," she writes, "and Louis, who was busy writing, took his meals in
+his room.  Knowing there was no one to cook his lunch, he told Sosimo to
+bring him some bread and cheese.  To his surprise he was served with an
+excellent meal--an omelette, a good salad, and perfect coffee.  'Who
+cooked this?' asked Louis in Samoan.  'I did,' said Sosimo.  'Well,' said
+Louis, 'great is your wisdom.'  Sosimo bowed and corrected him--'Great is
+my love!'"
+
+Miss Stubbs, in her _Stevenson's Shrine_; _the Record of a Pilgrimage_,
+illustrates the same devotion.  On the top of Mount Vaea, she writes, is
+the massive sarcophagus, "not an ideal structure by any means, not even
+beautiful, and yet in its massive ruggedness it somehow suited the man
+and the place."
+
+"The wind sighed softly in the branches of the 'Tavau' trees, from out
+the green recesses of the 'Toi' came the plaintive coo of the
+wood-pigeon.  In and out of the branches of the magnificent 'Fau' tree,
+which overhangs the grave, a king-fisher, sea-blue, iridescent, flitted
+to and fro, whilst a scarlet hibiscus, in full flower, showed up royally
+against the gray lichened cement.  All around was light and life and
+colour, and I said to myself, 'He is made one with nature'; he is now,
+body and soul and spirit, commingled with the loveliness around.  He who
+longed in life to scale the height, he who attained his wish only in
+death, has become in himself a parable of fulfilment.  No need now for
+that heart-sick cry:--
+
+   "'Sing me a song of a lad that is gone,
+   Say, could that lad be I?'
+
+No need now for the despairing finality of:
+
+   "'I have trod the upward and the downward slope,
+   I have endured and done in the days of yore,
+   I have longed for all, and bid farewell to hope,
+   And I have lived, and loved, and closed the door.'
+
+   "Death has set his seal of peace on the unequal conflict of mind and
+   matter; the All-Mother has gathered him to herself.
+
+   "In years to come, when his grave is perchance forgotten, a rugged
+   ruin, home of the lizard and the bat, Tusitala--the story-teller--'the
+   man with a heart of gold' (as I so often heard him designated in the
+   Islands), will live, when it may be his tales have ceased to interest,
+   in the tender remembrance of those whose lives he beautified, and
+   whose hearts he warmed into gratitude."
+
+The chiefs have prohibited the use of firearms or other weapons on Mount
+Vaea, "in order that the birds may live there undisturbed and unafraid,
+and build their nests in the trees around Tusitala's grave."
+
+Miss Stubbs has many records of the impression produced on those he came
+in contact with in Samoa--white men and women as well as natives.  She
+met a certain Austrian Count, who adored Stevenson's memory.  Over his
+camp bed was a framed photograph of R. L. Stevenson.
+
+   "So," he said, "I keep him there, for he was my saviour, and I wish
+   'good-night' and 'good-morning,' every day, both to himself and to his
+   old home."  The Count then told us that when he was stopping at
+   Vailima he used to have his bath daily on the verandah below his room.
+   One lovely morning he got up very early, got into the bath, and
+   splashed and sang, feeling very well and very happy, and at last
+   beginning to sing very loudly, he forgot Mr Stevenson altogether.  All
+   at once there was Stevenson himself, his hair all ruffled up, his eyes
+   full of anger.  "Man," he said, "you and your infernal row have cost
+   me more than two hundred pounds in ideas," and with that he was gone,
+   but he did not address the Count again the whole of that day.  Next
+   morning he had forgotten the Count's offence and was just as friendly
+   as ever, but--the noise was never repeated!
+
+Another of the Count's stories greatly amused the visitors:
+
+   "An English lord came all the way to Samoa in his yacht to see Mr
+   Stevenson, and found him in his cool Kimino sitting with the ladies,
+   and drinking tea on his verandah; the whole party had their feet bare.
+   The English lord thought that he must have called at the wrong time,
+   and offered to go away, but Mr Stevenson called out to him, and
+   brought him back, and made him stay to dinner.  They all went away to
+   dress, and the guest was left sitting alone in the verandah.  Soon
+   they came back, Mr Osbourne and Mr Stevenson wearing the form of dress
+   most usual in that hot climate a white mess jacket, and white
+   trousers, but their feet were still bare.  The guest put up his
+   eyeglass and stared for a bit, then he looked down upon his own
+   beautifully shod feet, and sighed.  They all talked and laughed until
+   the ladies came in, the ladies in silk dresses, befrilled with lace,
+   but still with bare feet, and the guest took a covert look through his
+   eyeglass and gasped, but when he noticed that there were gold bangles
+   on Mrs Strong's ankles and rings upon her toes, he could bear no more
+   and dropped his eyeglass on the ground of the verandah breaking it all
+   to bits."
+
+Miss Stubbs met on the other side of the island a photographer who told
+her this:
+
+   "I had but recently come to Samoa," he said, "and was standing one day
+   in my shop when Mr Stevenson came in and spoke.  'Man,' he said, 'I
+   tak ye to be a Scotsman like mysel'.'
+
+   "I would I could have claimed a kinship," deplored the photographer,
+   "but, alas!  I am English to the backbone, with never a drop of Scotch
+   blood in my veins, and I told him this, regretting the absence of the
+   blood tie."
+
+   "'I could have sworn your back was the back of a Scotsman,' was his
+   comment, 'but,' and he held out his hand, 'you look sick, and there is
+   a fellowship in sickness not to be denied.' I said I was not strong,
+   and had come to the Island on account of my health.  'Well, then,'
+   replied Mr Stevenson, 'it shall be my business to help you to get
+   well; come to Vailima whenever you like, and if I am out, ask for
+   refreshment, and wait until I come in, you will always find a welcome
+   there.'"
+
+   At this point my informant turned away, and there was a break in his
+   voice as he exclaimed, "Ah, the years go on, and I don't miss him
+   less, but more; next to my mother he was the best friend I ever had: a
+   man with a heart of gold; his house was a second home to me."
+
+Stevenson's experience shows how easy it is with a certain type of man,
+to restore the old feudal conditions of service and relationship.
+Stevenson did this in essentials in Samoa.  He tells us how he managed to
+get good service out of the Samoans (who are accredited with great
+unwillingness to work); and this he _did_ by firm, but generous, kindly,
+almost brotherly treatment, reviving, as it were, a kind of clan
+life--giving a livery of certain colours--symbol of all this.  A little
+fellow of eight, he tells, had been taken into the household, made a pet
+of by Mrs Strong, his stepdaughter, and had had a dress given to him,
+like that of the men; and, when one day he had strolled down by himself
+as far as the hotel, and the master of it, seeing him, called out in
+Samoan, "Hi, youngster, who are you?"  The eight-year-old replied, "Why,
+don't you see for yourself?  I am one of the Vailima men!"
+
+The story of the _Road of the Loving Heart_ was but another fine
+attestation of it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII--HIS GENIUS AND METHODS
+
+
+To have created a school of idolaters, who will out and out swear by
+everything, and as though by necessity, at the same time, a school of
+studious detractors, who will suspiciously question everything, or throw
+out suggestions of disparagement, is at all events, a proof of greatness,
+the countersign of undoubted genius, and an assurance of lasting fame.  R.
+L. Stevenson has certainly secured this.  Time will tell what of virtue
+there is with either party.  For me, who knew Stevenson, and loved him,
+as finding in the sweet-tempered, brave, and in some things, most
+generous man, what gave at once tone and elevation to the artist, I would
+fain indicate here my impressions of him and his genius--impressions that
+remain almost wholly uninfluenced by the vast mass of matter about him
+that the press now turns out.  Books, not to speak of articles, pour
+forth about him--about his style, his art, his humour and his
+characters--aye, and even about his religion.
+
+Miss Simpson follows Mr Bellyse Baildon with the _Edinburgh Days_, Miss
+Moyes Black comes on with her picture in the _Famous Scots_, and
+Professor Raleigh succeeds her; Mr Graham Balfour follows with his_
+Life_; Mr Kelman's volume about his Religion comes next, and that is
+reinforced by more familiar letters and _Table Talk_, by Lloyd Osbourne
+and Mrs Strong, his step-children; Mr J. Hammerton then comes on handily
+with _Stevensoniana_--fruit lovingly gathered from many and far fields,
+and garnered with not a little tact and taste, and catholicity; Miss
+Laura Stubbs then presents us with her touching _Stevenson's Shrine_:
+_the Record of a Pilgrimage_; and Mr Sidney Colvin is now busily at work
+on his _Life of Stevenson_, which must do not a little to enlighten and
+to settle many questions.
+
+Curiosity and interest grow as time passes; and the places connected with
+Stevenson, hitherto obscure many of them, are now touched with light if
+not with romance, and are known, by name at all events, to every reader
+of books.  Yes; every place he lived in, or touched at, is worthy of full
+description if only on account of its associations with him.  If there is
+not a land of Stevenson, as there is a land of Scott, or of Burns, it is
+due to the fact that he was far-travelled, and in his works painted many
+scenes: but there are at home--Edinburgh, and Halkerside and Allermuir,
+Caerketton, Swanston, and Colinton, and Maw Moss and Rullion Green and
+Tummel, "the _wale_ of Scotland," as he named it to me, and the
+Castletown of Braemar--Braemar in his view coming a good second to
+Tummel, for starting-points to any curious worshipper who would go the
+round in Scotland and miss nothing.  Mr Geddie's work on _The Home
+Country of Stevenson_ may be found very helpful here.
+
+1. It is impossible to separate Stevenson from his work, because of the
+imperious personal element in it; and so I shall not now strive to gain
+the appearance of cleverness by affecting any distinction here.  The
+first thing I would say is, that he was when I knew him--what pretty much
+to the end he remained--a youth.  His outlook on life was boyishly genial
+and free, despite all his sufferings from ill-health--it was the pride of
+action, the joy of endurance, the revelry of high spirits, and the sense
+of victory that most fascinated him; and his theory of life was to take
+pleasure and give pleasure, without calculation or stint--a kind of
+boyish grace and bounty never to be overcome or disturbed by outer
+accident or change.  If he was sometimes haunted with the thought of
+changes through changed conditions or circumstances, as my very old
+friend, Mr Charles Lowe, has told even of the College days that he was
+always supposing things to undergo some sea-change into something else,
+if not "into something rich and strange," this was but to add to his
+sense of enjoyment, and the power of conferring delight, and the luxuries
+of variety, as boys do when they let fancy loose.  And this always had,
+with him, an individual reference or return.  He was thus constantly, and
+latterly, half-consciously, trying to interpret himself somehow through
+all the things which engaged him, and which he so transmogrified--things
+that especially attracted him and took his fancy.  Thus, if it must be
+confessed, that even in his highest moments, there lingers a touch--if no
+more than a touch--of self-consciousness which will not allow him to
+forget manner in matter, it is also true that he is cunningly conveying
+traits in himself; and the sense of this is often at the root of his
+sweet, gentle, naive humour.  There is, therefore, some truth in the
+criticisms which assert that even "long John Silver," that fine pirate,
+with his one leg, was, after all, a shadow of Stevenson himself--the
+genial buccaneer who did his tremendous murdering with a smile on his
+face was but Stevenson thrown into new circumstances, or, as one has
+said, Stevenson-cum-Henley, so thrown as was also Archer in _Weir of
+Hermiston_, and more than this, that his most successful women-folk--like
+Miss Grant and Catriona--are studies of himself, and that in all his
+heroes, and even heroines, was an unmistakable touch of R. L. Stevenson.
+Even Mr Baildon rather maladroitly admits that in Miss Grant, the Lord
+Advocate's daughter, _there is a good deal of the author himself
+disguised in petticoats_.  I have thought of Stevenson in many suits,
+beside that which included the velvet jacket, but--petticoats!
+
+Youth is autocratic, and can show a grand indifferency: it goes for what
+it likes, and ignores all else--it fondly magnifies its favourites, and,
+after all, to a great extent, it is but analysing, dealing with and
+presenting itself to us, if we only watch well.  This is the secret of
+all prevailing romance: it is the secret of all stories of adventure and
+chivalry of the simpler and more primitive order; and in one aspect it is
+true that R. L. Stevenson loved and clung to the primitive and elemental,
+if it may not be said, as one distinguished writer has said, that he even
+loved savagery in itself.  But hardly could it be seriously held, as Mr
+I. Zangwill held:
+
+   "That women did not cut any figure in his books springs from this same
+   interest in the elemental.  Women are not born, but made.  They are a
+   social product of infinite complexity and delicacy.  For a like reason
+   Stevenson was no interpreter of the modern. . . . A child to the end,
+   always playing at 'make-believe,' dying young, as those whom the gods
+   love, and, as he would have died had he achieved his centenary, he was
+   the natural exponent in literature of the child."
+
+But there were subtly qualifying elements beyond what Mr Zangwill here
+recognises and reinforces.  That is just about as correct and true as
+this other deliverance:
+
+   "His Scotch romances have been as over-praised by the zealous Scotsmen
+   who cry 'genius' at the sight of a kilt, and who lose their heads at a
+   waft from the heather, as his other books have been under-praised.  The
+   best of all, _The Master of Ballantrae_, ends in a bog; and where the
+   author aspires to exceptional subtlety of character-drawing he befogs
+   us or himself altogether.  We are so long weighing the brothers
+   Ballantrae in the balance, watching it incline now this way, now that,
+   scrupulously removing a particle of our sympathy from the one brother
+   to the other, to restore it again in the next chapter, that we end
+   with a conception of them as confusing as Mr Gilbert's conception of
+   Hamlet, who was idiotically sane with lucid intervals of lunacy."
+
+If Stevenson was, as Mr Zangwill holds, "the child to the end," and the
+child only, then if we may not say what Carlyle said of De Quincey:
+"_Eccovi_, that child has been in hell," we may say, "_Eccovi_, that
+child has been in unchildlike haunts, and can't forget the memory of
+them."  In a sense every romancer is a child--such was Ludwig Tieck, such
+was Scott, such was James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd.  But each is
+something more--he has been touched with the wand of a fairy, and knows,
+at least, some of Elfin Land as well as of childhood's home.
+
+The sense of Stevenson's youthfulness seems to have struck every one who
+had intimacy with him.  Mr Baildon writes (p. 21 of his book):
+
+   I would now give much to possess but one of Stevenson's gifts--namely,
+   that extraordinary vividness of recollection by which he could so
+   astonishingly recall, not only the doings, but the very thoughts and
+   emotions of his youth.  For, often as we must have communed together,
+   with all the shameless candour of boys, hardly any remark has stuck to
+   me except the opinion already alluded to, which struck me--his elder
+   by some fifteen months--as very amusing, that at sixteen 'we should be
+   men.'  _He of all mortals_, _who was_, _in a sense_, _always still a
+   boy_!"
+
+Mr Gosse tells us:
+
+   "He had retained a great deal of the temperament of a child, and it
+   was his philosophy to encourage it.  In his dreary passages of bed,
+   when his illness was more than commonly heavy on him, he used to
+   contrive little amusements for himself.  He played on the flute, or he
+   modelled little groups and figures in clay."
+
+2. One of the qualifying elements unnoted by Mr Zangwill is simply this,
+that R. L. Stevenson never lost the strange tint imparted to his youth by
+the religious influences to which he was subject, and which left their
+impress and colour on him and all that he did.  Henley, in his striking
+sonnet, hit it when he wrote:
+
+   "A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck,
+   Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all,
+   _And something of the Shorter Catechist_."
+
+_Something_! he was a great deal of Shorter Catechist!  Scotch Calvinism,
+its metaphysic, and all the strange whims, perversities, and questionings
+of "Fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute," which it inevitably
+awakens, was much with him--the sense of reprobation and the gloom born
+of it, as well as the abounding joy in the sense of the elect--the
+Covenanters and their wild resolutions, the moss-troopers and their dare-
+devilries--Pentland Risings and fights of Rullion Green; he not only
+never forgot them, but they mixed themselves as in his very breath of
+life, and made him a great questioner.  How would I have borne myself in
+this or in that?  Supposing I had been there, how would it have been--the
+same, or different from what it was with those that were there?  His work
+is throughout at bottom a series of problems that almost all trace to
+this root, directly or indirectly.  "There, but for the grace of God,
+goes John Bradford," said the famous Puritan on seeing a felon led to
+execution; so with Stevenson.  Hence his fondness for tramps, for scamps
+(he even bestowed special attention and pains on Villon, the poet-scamp);
+he was rather impatient with poor Thoreau, because he was a purist
+solitary, and had too little of vice, and, as Stevenson held, narrow in
+sympathy, and too self-satisfied, and bent only on self-improvement.  He
+held a brief for the honest villain, and leaned to him brotherly.  Even
+the anecdotes he most prizes have a fine look this way--a hunger for
+completion in achievement, even in the violation of fine humane feeling
+or morality, and all the time a sense of submission to God's will.
+"Doctor," said the dying gravedigger in _Old Mortality_, "I hae laid
+three hunner an' fower score in that kirkyaird, an' had it been His
+wull," indicating Heaven, "I wad hae likeit weel to hae made oot the
+fower hunner."  That took Stevenson.  Listen to what Mr Edmond Gosse
+tells of his talk, when he found him in a private hotel in Finsbury
+Circus, London, ready to be put on board a steamer for America, on 21st
+August, 1887:
+
+   "It was church time, and there was some talk of my witnessing his
+   will, which I could not do because there could be found no other
+   reputable witness, the whole crew of the hotel being at church.
+   'This,' he said, 'is the way in which our valuable city hotels--packed
+   no doubt with gems and jewellery--are deserted on a Sunday morning.
+   Some bold piratical fellow, defying the spirit of Sabbatarianism,
+   might make a handsome revenue by sacking the derelict hotels between
+   the hours of ten and twelve.  One hotel a week would enable such a man
+   to retire in course of a year.  A mask might perhaps be worn for the
+   mere fancy of the thing, and to terrify kitchen-maids, but no real
+   disguise would be needful.'"
+
+I would rather agree with Mr Chesterton than with Mr Zangwill here:
+
+   "Stevenson's enormous capacity for joy flowed directly out of his
+   profoundly religious temperament.  He conceived himself as an
+   unimportant guest at one eternal and uproarious banquet, and instead
+   of grumbling at the soup, he accepted it with careless gratitude. . .
+   . His gaiety was neither the gaiety of the pagan, nor the gaiety of
+   the _bon vivant_.  It was the greater gaiety of the mystic.  He could
+   enjoy trifles because there was to him no such thing as a trifle.  He
+   was a child who respected his dolls because they were the images of
+   the image of God, portraits at only two removes."
+
+Here, then, we have the child crossed by the dreamer and the mystic, bred
+of Calvinism and speculation on human fate and chance, and on the mystery
+of temperament and inheritance, and all that flows from
+these--reprobation, with its dire shadows, assured Election with its
+joys, etc., etc.
+
+3. If such a combination is in favour of the story-teller up to a certain
+point, it is not favourable to the highest flights, and it is alien to
+dramatic presentation pure and simple.  This implies detachment from
+moods and characters, high as well as low, that complete justice in
+presentation may be done to all alike, and the one balance that obtains
+in life grasped and repeated with emphasis.  But towards his leading
+characters Stevenson is unconsciously biassed, because they are more or
+less shadowy projections of himself, or images through which he would
+reveal one or other side or aspect of his own personality.  Attwater is a
+confessed failure, because it, more than any other, testifies this: he is
+but a mouth-piece for one side or tendency in Stevenson.  If the same
+thing is not more decisively felt in some other cases, it is because
+Stevenson there showed the better art o' hidin', and not because he was
+any more truly detached or dramatic.  "Of Hamlet most of all," wrote
+Henley in his sonnet.  The Hamlet in Stevenson--the self-questioning,
+egotistic, moralising Hamlet--was, and to the end remained, a something
+alien to bold, dramatic, creative freedom.  He is great as an artist, as
+a man bent on giving to all that he did the best and most distinguished
+form possible, but not great as a free creator of dramatic power.
+"Mother," he said as a mere child, "I've drawed a man.  Now, will I draw
+his soul?"  He was to the end all too fond to essay a picture of the
+soul, separate and peculiar.  All the Jekyll and Hyde and even Ballantrae
+conceptions came out of that--and what is more, he always mixed his own
+soul with the other soul, and could not help doing so.
+
+4. When; therefore, I find Mr Pinero, in lecturing at Edinburgh, deciding
+in favour of Stevenson as possessed of rare dramatic power, and wondering
+why he did not more effectively employ it, I can't agree with him; and
+this because of the presence of a certain atmosphere in the novels, alien
+to free play of the individualities presented.  Like Hawthorne's, like
+the works of our great symbolists, they are restricted by a sense of some
+obtaining conception, some weird metaphysical _weird_ or preconception.
+This is the ground "Ian MacLaren" has for saying that "his kinship is not
+with Boccaccio and Rabelais, but with Dante and Spenser"--the ground for
+many remarks by critics to the effect that they still crave from him
+"less symbol and more individuality"--the ground for the Rev. W. J.
+Dawson's remark that "he has a powerful and persistent sense of the
+spiritual forces which move behind the painted shows of life; that he
+writes not only as a realist but as a prophet, his meanest stage being
+set with eternity as a background."
+
+Such expressions are fullest justification for what we have here said: it
+adds, and can only add, to our admiration of Stevenson, as a thinker,
+seer, or mystic, but the asserting sense of such power can only end in
+lessening the height to which he could attain as a dramatic artist; and
+there is much indeed against Mr Pinero's own view that, in the dramas, he
+finds that "fine speeches" are ruinous to them as acting plays.  In the
+strict sense overfine speeches are yet almost everywhere.  David Balfour
+could never have writ some speeches attributed to him--they are just R.
+L. Stevenson with a very superficial difference that, when once detected,
+renders them curious and quaint and interesting, but not dramatic.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII--PREACHER AND MYSTIC FABULIST
+
+
+In reality, Stevenson is always directly or indirectly preaching a
+sermon--enforcing a moral--as though he could not help it.  "He would
+rise from the dead to preach a sermon."  He wrote some first-rate fables,
+and might indeed have figured to effect as a moralist-fabulist, as truly
+he was from beginning to end.  There was a bit of Bunyan in him as well
+as of AEsop and Rousseau and Thoreau--the mixture that found coherency in
+his most peculiarly patient and forbearing temper is what gives at once
+the quaintness, the freedom, and yet the odd didactic something that is
+never wanting.  I remember a fable about the Devil that might well be
+brought in to illustrate this here--careful readers who neglect nothing
+that Stevenson wrote will remember it also and perhaps bear me out here.
+
+But for the sake of the young folks who may yet have some leeway to make
+up, I shall indulge myself a little by quoting it: and, since I am on
+that tack, follow it by another which presents Stevenson in his favourite
+guise of quizzing his own characters, if not for his own advantage
+certainly for ours, if we would in the least understand the fine moralist-
+casuistical qualities of his mind and fancy:
+
+   THE DEVIL AND THE INNKEEPER
+
+   Once upon a time the devil stayed at an inn, where no one knew him,
+   for they were people whose education had been neglected.  He was bent
+   on mischief, and for a time kept everybody by the ears.  But at last
+   the innkeeper set a watch upon the devil and took him in the act.
+
+   The innkeeper got a rope's end.
+
+   "Now I am going to thrash you," said the inn-keeper.
+
+   "You have no right to be angry with me," said the devil.  "I am only
+   the devil, and it is my nature to do wrong."
+
+   "Is that so?" asked the innkeeper.
+
+   "Fact, I assure you," said the devil.
+
+   "You really cannot help doing ill?" asked the innkeeper.
+
+   "Not in the smallest," said the devil, "it would be useless cruelty to
+   thrash a thing like me."
+
+   "It would indeed," said the innkeeper.
+
+   And he made a noose and hanged the devil.
+
+   "There!" said the innkeeper.
+
+The deeper Stevenson goes, the more happily is he inspired.  We could
+scarcely cite anything more Stevensonian, alike in its humour and its
+philosophy, than the dialogue between Captain Smollett and Long John
+Silver, entitled _The Persons of the Tale_.  After chapter xxxii. of
+_Treasure Island_, these two puppets "strolled out to have a pipe before
+business should begin again, and met in an open space not far from the
+story."  After a few preliminaries:
+
+   "You're a damned rogue, my man," said the Captain.
+
+   "Come, come, Cap'n, be just," returned the other.  "There's no call to
+   be angry with me in earnest.  I'm on'y a character in a sea story.  I
+   don't really exist."
+
+   "Well, I don't really exist either," says the Captain, "which seems to
+   meet that."
+
+   "I wouldn't set no limits to what a virtuous character might consider
+   argument," responded Silver.  "But I'm the villain of the tale, I am;
+   and speaking as one seafaring man to another, what I want to know is,
+   what's the odds?"
+
+   "Were you never taught your catechism?" said the Captain.  "Don't you
+   know there's such a thing as an Author?"
+
+   "Such a thing as a Author?" returned John, derisively.  "And who
+   better'n me?  And the p'int is, if the Author made you, he made Long
+   John, and he made Hands, and Pew, and George Merry--not that George is
+   up to much, for he's little more'n a name; and he made Flint, what
+   there is of him; and he made this here mutiny, you keep such a work
+   about; and he had Tom Redruth shot; and--well, if that's a Author,
+   give me Pew!"
+
+   "Don't you believe in a future state?" said Smollett.  "Do you think
+   there's nothing but the present sorty-paper?"
+
+   " I don't rightly know for that," said Silver, "and I don't see what
+   it's got to do with it, anyway.  What I know is this: if there is sich
+   a thing as a Author, I'm his favourite chara'ter.  He does me fathoms
+   better'n he does you--fathoms, he does.  And he likes doing me.  He
+   keeps me on deck mostly all the time, crutch and all; and he leaves
+   you measling in the hold, where nobody can't see you, nor wants to,
+   and you may lay to that!  If there is a Author, by thunder, but he's
+   on my side, and you may lay to it!"
+
+   "I see he's giving you a long rope," said the Captain. . . .
+
+Stevenson's stories--one and all--are too closely the illustrations by
+characters of which his essays furnish the texts.  You shall not read the
+one wholly apart from the other without losing something--without losing
+much of the quaint, often childish, and always insinuating personality of
+the writer.  It is this if fully perceived which would justify one
+writer, Mr Zangwill, if I don't forget, in saying, as he did say, that
+Stevenson would hold his place by his essays and not by his novels.  Hence
+there is a unity in all, but a unity found in a root which is ultimately
+inimical to what is strictly free dramatic creation--creation, broad,
+natural and unmoral in the highest sense just as nature is, as it is to
+us, for example, when we speak of Shakespeare, or even Scott, or of
+Cervantes or Fielding.  If Mr Henley in his irruptive if not spiteful
+_Pall Mall Magazine_ article had made this clear from the high critical
+ground, then some of his derogatory remarks would not have been quite so
+personal and offensive as they are.
+
+Stevenson's bohemianism was always restrained and coloured by this.  He
+is a casuistic moralist, if not a Shorter Catechist, as Mr Henley put it
+in his clever sonnet.  He is constantly asking himself about moral laws
+and how they work themselves out in character, especially as these
+suggest and involve the casuistries of human nature.  He is often a
+little like Nathaniel Hawthorne, but he hardly follows them far enough
+and rests on his own preconceptions and predilections, only he does not,
+like him, get into or remain long in the cobwebby corners--his love of
+the open air and exercise derived from generations of active lighthouse
+engineers, out at all times on sea or land, or from Scottish ministers
+who were fond of composing their sermons and reflecting on the
+backwardness of human nature as they walked in their gardens or along the
+hillsides even among mists and storms, did something to save him here,
+reinforcing natural cheerfulness and the warm desire to give pleasure.
+His excessive elaboration of style, which grew upon him more and more,
+giving throughout often a sense of extreme artificiality and of the self-
+consciousness usually bred of it, is but another incidental proof of
+this.  And let no reader think that I wish here to decry R. L. Stevenson.
+I only desire faithfully to try to understand him, and to indicate the
+class or group to which his genius and temperament really belong.  He is
+from first to last the idealistic dreamy or mystical romancer, and not
+the true idealist or dealer direct with life or character for its own
+sake.  The very beauty and sweetness of his spirit in one way militated
+against his dramatic success--he really did not believe in villains, and
+always made them better than they should have been, and that, too, on the
+very side where wickedness--their natural wickedness--is most
+available--on the stage.  The dreamer of dreams and the Shorter
+Catechist, strangely united together, were here directly at odds with the
+creative power, and crossed and misdirected it, and the casuist came in
+and manoeuvred the limelight--all too like the old devil of the mediaeval
+drama, who was made only to be laughed at and taken lightly, a buffoon
+and a laughing-stock indeed.  And while he could unveil villainy, as is
+the case pre-eminently in Huish in the _Ebb-Tide_, he shrank from
+inflicting the punishments for which untutored human nature looks, and
+thus he lost one great aid to crude dramatic effect.  As to his poems,
+they are intimately personal in his happiest moments: he deals with
+separate moods and sentiments, and scarcely ever touches those of a type
+alien to his own.  The defect of his child poems is distinctly that he is
+everywhere strictly recalling and reproducing his own quaint and wholly
+exceptional childhood; and children, ordinary, normal, healthy children,
+will not take to these poems (though grown-ups largely do so), as they
+would to, say, the _Lilliput Levee_ of my old friend, W. B. Rands.  Rands
+showed a great deal of true dramatic play there within his own very
+narrow limits, as, at all events, adults must conceive them.
+
+Even in his greatest works, in _The Master of Ballantrae_ and _Weir of
+Hermiston_, the special power in Stevenson really lies in subduing his
+characters at the most critical point for action, to make them prove or
+sustain his thesis; and in this way the rare effect that he might have
+secured _dramatically_ is largely lost and make-believe substituted, as
+in the Treasure Search in the end of _The Master of Ballantrae_.  The
+powerful dramatic effect he might have had in his _denouement_ is thus
+completely sacrificed.  The essence of the drama for the stage is that
+the work is for this and this alone--dialogue and everything being only
+worked rightly when it bears on, aids, and finally secures this in happy
+completeness.
+
+In a word, you always, in view of true dramatic effect, see Stevenson
+himself too clearly behind his characters.  The "fine speeches" Mr Pinero
+referred to trace to the intrusion behind the glass of a
+part-quicksilvered portion, which cunningly shows, when the glass is
+moved about, Stevenson himself behind the character, as we have said
+already.  For long he shied dealing with women, as though by a true
+instinct.  Unfortunately for him his image was as clear behind
+_Catriona_, with the discerning, as anywhere else; and this, alas! too
+far undid her as an independent, individual character, though traits like
+those in her author were attractive.  The constant effort to relieve the
+sense of this affords him the most admirable openings for the display of
+his exquisite style, of which he seldom or never fails to make the very
+most in this regard; but the necessity laid upon him to aim at securing a
+sense of relief by this is precisely the same as led him to write the
+overfine speeches in the plays, as Mr Pinero found and pointed out at
+Edinburgh: both defeat the true end, but in the written book mere art of
+style and a naivete and a certain sweetness of temper conceal the lack of
+nature and creative spontaneity; while on the stage the descriptions,
+saving reflections and fine asides, are ruthlessly cut away under sheer
+stage necessities, or, if left, but hinder the action; and art of this
+kind does not there suffice to conceal the lack of nature.
+
+More clearly to bring out my meaning here and draw aid from comparative
+illustration, let me take my old friend of many years, Charles Gibbon.
+Gibbon was poor, very poor, in intellectual subtlety compared with
+Stevenson; he had none of his sweet, quaint, original fancy; he was no
+casuist; he was utterly void of power in the subdued humorous twinkle or
+genial by-play in which Stevenson excelled.  But he has more of dramatic
+power, pure and simple, than Stevenson had--his novels--the best of
+them--would far more easily yield themselves to the ordinary purposes of
+the ordinary playwright.  Along with conscientiousness, perception,
+penetration, with the dramatist must go a certain indescribable common-
+sense commonplaceness--if I may name it so--protection against vagary and
+that over-refined egotism and self-confession which is inimical to the
+drama and in which the Stevensonian type all too largely abounds for
+successful dramatic production.  Mr Henley perhaps put it too strongly
+when he said that what was supremely of interest to R. L. Stevenson was
+Stevenson himself; but he indicates the tendency, and that tendency is
+inimical to strong, broad, effective and varied dramatic presentation.
+Water cannot rise above its own level; nor can minds of this type go
+freely out of themselves in a grandly healthy, unconscious, and
+unaffected way, and this is the secret of the dramatic spirit, if it be
+not, as Shelley said, the secret of morals, which Stevenson, when he
+passed away, was but on the way to attain.  As we shall see, he had risen
+so far above it, subdued it, triumphed over it, that we really cannot
+guess what he might have attained had but more years been given him.  For
+the last attainment of the loftiest and truest genius is precisely
+this--to gain such insight of the real that all else becomes subsidiary.
+True simplicity and the abiding relief and enduring power of true art
+with all classes lies here and not elsewhere.  Cleverness, refinement,
+fancy, and invention, even sublety of intellect, are practically nowhere
+in this sphere without this.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV--STEVENSON AS DRAMATIST
+
+
+In opposition to Mr Pinero, therefore, I assert that Stevenson's defect
+in spontaneous dramatic presentation is seen clearly in his novels as
+well as in his plays proper.
+
+In writing to my good friend, Mr Thomas M'Kie, Advocate, Edinburgh,
+telling him of my work on R. L. Stevenson and the results, I thus
+gathered up in little the broad reflections on this point, and I may
+perhaps be excused quoting the following passages, as they reinforce by a
+new reference or illustration or two what has just been said:
+
+   "Considering his great keenness and force on some sides, I find R. L.
+   Stevenson markedly deficient in grip on other sides--common sides,
+   after all, of human nature.  This was so far largely due to a dreamy,
+   mystical, so far perverted and, so to say, often even inverted
+   casuistical, fatalistic morality, which would not allow him scope in
+   what Carlyle would have called a healthy hatred of fools and
+   scoundrels; with both of which classes--vagabonds in strictness--he
+   had rather too much of a sneaking sympathy.  Mr Pinero was
+   wrong--totally and incomprehensibly wrong--when he told the good folks
+   of Edinburgh at the Philosophical Institution, and afterwards at the
+   London Birkbeck Institution, that it was lack of concentration and
+   care that made R. L. Stevenson a failure as a dramatist.  No: it was
+   here and not elsewhere that the failure lay.  R. L. Stevenson was
+   himself an unconscious paradox--and sometimes he realised it--his
+   great weakness from this point of view being that he wished to show
+   strong and original by making the villain the hero of the piece as
+   well.  Now, _that_, if it may, by clever manipulation and dexterity,
+   be made to do in a novel, most certainly it will not do on the
+   stage--more especially if it is done consciously and, as it were, of
+   _malice prepense_; because, for one thing, there is in the theatre a
+   very varied yet united audience which has to give a simultaneous and
+   immediate verdict--an audience not inclined to some kinds of
+   overwrought subtleties and casuistries, however clever the technique.
+   If _The Master of Ballantrae_ (which has some highly dramatic scenes
+   and situations, if it is not in itself substantially a drama) were to
+   be put on the stage, the playwright, if wisely determined for success,
+   would really have--not in details, but in essential conception--to
+   kick R. L. Stevenson in his most personal aim out of it, and take and
+   present a more definite moral view of the two villain-heroes
+   (brothers, too); improve and elevate the one a bit if he lowered the
+   other, and not wobble in sympathy and try to make the audience wobble
+   in sympathy also, as R. L. Stevenson certainly does.  As for _Beau
+   Austin_, it most emphatically, in view of this, should be re-writ--re-
+   writ especially towards the ending--and the scandalous Beau tarred and
+   feathered, metaphorically speaking, instead of walking off at the end
+   in a sneaking, mincing sort of way, with no more than a little
+   momentary twinge of discomfort at the wreck and ruin he has wrought,
+   for having acted as a selfish, snivelling poltroon and coward, though
+   in fine clothes and with fine ways and fine manners, which only, from
+   our point of view, make matters worse.  It is, with variations I
+   admit, much the same all through: R. L. Stevenson felt it and
+   confessed it about the _Ebb-Tide_, and Huish, the cockney hero and
+   villain; but the sense of healthy disgust, even at the vile Huish, is
+   not emphasised in the book as it would have demanded to be for the
+   stage--the audience would not have stood it, and the more mixed and
+   varied, the less would it have stood it--not at all; and his relief of
+   style and fine or finished speeches would not _there_ in the least
+   have told.  This is demanded of the drama--that at once it satisfies a
+   certain crude something subsisting under all outward glosses and
+   veneers that might be in some a lively sense of right and wrong--the
+   uprisal of a conscience, in fact, or in others a vague instinct of
+   proper reward or punishment, which will even cover and sanction
+   certain kinds of revenge or retaliation.  The one feeling will emerge
+   most among the cultured, and the other among the ruder and more
+   ignorant; but both meet immediately on beholding action and the limits
+   of action on the demand for some clear leading to what may be called
+   Providential equity--each man undoubtedly rewarded or punished,
+   roughly, according to his deserts, if not outwardly then certainly in
+   the inner torments that so often lead to confessions.  There it is--a
+   radical fact of human nature--as radical as any reading of trait or
+   determination of character presented--seen in the Greek drama as well
+   as in Shakespeare and the great Elizabethan dramatists, and in the
+   drama-transpontine and others of to-day.  R. L. Stevenson was all too
+   casuistical (though not in the exclusively bad sense) for this; and so
+   he was not dramatic, though _Weir of Hermiston_ promised something
+   like an advance to it, and _St Ives_ did, in my idea, yet more."
+
+The one essential of a _dramatic_ piece is that, by the interaction of
+character and incident (one or other may be preponderating, according to
+the type and intention of the writer) all naturally leads up to a crisis
+in which the moral motives, appealed to or awakened by the presentation
+of the play, are justified.  Where this is wanting the true leading and
+the definite justification are wanting.  Goethe failed in this in his
+_Faust_, resourceful and far-seeing though he was--he failed because a
+certain sympathy is awakened for Mephistopheles in being, so to say,
+chivied out of his bargain, when he had complied with the terms of the
+contract by Faust; and Gounod in his opera does exactly for "immediate
+dramatic effect," what we hold it would be necessary to do for R. L.
+Stevenson.  Goethe, with his casuistries which led him to allegory and
+all manner of overdone symbolisms and perversions in the Second Part, is
+set aside and a true crisis and close is found by Gounod through simply
+sending Marguerite above and Faust below, as, indeed, Faust had agreed by
+solemn compact with Mephistopheles that it should be.  And to come to
+another illustration from our own times, Mr Bernard Shaw's very clever
+and all too ingenious and over-subtle _Man and Superman_ would, in my
+idea, and for much the same reason, be an utterly ineffective and weak
+piece on the stage, however carefully handled and however clever the
+setting--the reason lying in the egotistic upsetting of the "personal
+equation" and the theory of life that lies behind all--tinting it with
+strange and even _outre_ colours.  Much the same has to be said of most
+of what are problem-plays--several of Ibsen's among the rest.
+
+Those who remember the Fairy opera of _Hansel and Gretel_ on the stage in
+London, will not have forgotten in the witching memory of all the charms
+of scenery and setting, how the scene where the witch of the wood, who
+was planning out the baking of the little hero and heroine in her oven,
+having "fatted" them up well, to make sweet her eating of them, was by
+the coolness and cleverness of the heroine locked in her own oven and
+baked there, literally brought down the house.  She received exactly what
+she had planned to give those children, whom their own cruel parents had
+unwittingly, by losing the children in the wood, put into her hands.
+Quaint, naive, half-grotesque it was in conception, yet the truth of all
+drama was there actively exhibited, and all casuistic pleading of excuses
+of some sort, even of justification for the witch (that it was her
+nature; heredity in her aworking, etc., etc.) would have not only been
+out of place, but hotly resented by that audience.  Now, Stevenson, if he
+could have made up his mind to have the witch locked in her own oven,
+would most assuredly have tried some device to get her out by some fairy
+witch-device or magic slide at the far end of it, and have proceeded to
+paint for us the changed character that she was after she had been so
+outwitted by a child, and her witchdom proved after all of little effect.
+He would have put probably some of the most effective moralities into her
+mouth if indeed he would not after all have made the witch a triumph on
+his early principle of bad-heartedness being strength.  If this is the
+sort of falsification which the play demands, and is of all tastes the
+most ungrateful, then, it is clear, that for full effect of the drama it
+is essential to it; but what is primary in it is the direct answering to
+certain immediate and instinctive demands in common human nature, the
+doing of which is far more effective than no end of deep philosophy to
+show how much better human nature would be if it were not just quite thus
+constituted.  "Concentration," says Mr Pinero, "is first, second, and
+last in it," and he goes on thus, as reported in the _Scotsman_, to show
+Stevenson's defect and mistake and, as is not, of course, unnatural, to
+magnify the greatness and grandeur of the style of work in which he has
+himself been so successful.
+
+   "If Stevenson had ever mastered that art--and I do not question that
+   if he had properly conceived it he had it in him to master it--he
+   might have found the stage a gold mine, but he would have found, too,
+   that it is a gold mine which cannot be worked in a smiling, sportive,
+   half-contemptuous spirit, but only in the sweat of the brain, and with
+   every mental nerve and sinew strained to its uttermost.  He would have
+   known that no ingots are to be got out of this mine, save after
+   sleepless nights, days of gloom and discouragement, and other days,
+   again, of feverish toil, the result of which proves in the end to be
+   misapplied and has to be thrown to the winds. . . . When you take up a
+   play-book (if ever you do take one up) it strikes you as being a very
+   trifling thing--a mere insubstantial pamphlet beside the imposing bulk
+   of the latest six-shilling novel.  Little do you guess that every page
+   of the play has cost more care, severer mental tension, if not more
+   actual manual labour, than any chapter of a novel, though it be fifty
+   pages long.  It is the height of the author's art, according to the
+   old maxim, that the ordinary spectator should never be clearly
+   conscious of the skill and travail that have gone to the making of the
+   finished product.  But the artist who would achieve a like feat must
+   realise its difficulties, or what are his chances of success?"
+
+But what I should, in little, be inclined to say, in answer to the
+"concentration" idea is that, unless you have first some firm hold on the
+broad bed-rock facts of human nature specially appealed to or called
+forth by the drama, you may concentrate as much as you please, but you
+will not write a successful acting drama, not to speak of a great one.  Mr
+Pinero's magnifications of the immense effort demanded from him must in
+the end come to mean that he himself does not instinctively and with
+natural ease and spontaneity secure this, but secures it only after great
+conscious effort; and hence, perhaps, it is that he as well as so many
+other modern playwrights fall so far behind alike in the amount turned
+out, and also in its quality as compared with the products of many
+playwrights in the past.
+
+The problem drama, in every phase and turn of it, endeavours to dispense
+with these fundamental demands implied in the common and instinctive
+sense or consciousness of the mass of men and women, and to substitute
+for that interest something which will artificially supersede it, or, at
+any rate, take its place.  The interest is transferred from the crises
+necessarily worked up to in the one case, with all of situation and
+dialogue directed to it, and without which it would not be strictly
+explicable, to something abnormal, odd, artificial or inverted, or
+exceptional in the characters themselves.  Having thus, instead of
+natural process and sequence, if we may put it so, the problem dramatist
+has a double task--he must gain what unity he can, and reach such crises
+as he may by artificial aids and inventions which the more he uses the
+more makes natural simplicity unattainable; and next he must reduce and
+hide as far as he can the abnormality he has, after all, in the long run,
+created and presented.  He cannot maintain it to the full, else his work
+would become a mere medical or psychological treatise under the poorest
+of disguises; and the very necessity for the action and reaction of
+characters upon each other is a further element against him.  In a word
+no one character can stand alone, and cannot escape influencing others,
+and also the action.  Thus it is that he cannot isolate as a doctor does
+his patient for scientific examination.  The healthy and normal must come
+in to modify on all sides what is presented of unhealthy and abnormal,
+and by its very presence expose the other, while at the same time it, by
+its very presence, ministers improvement, exactly as the sunlight
+disperses mist and all unhealthy vapours, germs, and microbes.
+
+The problem dramatist, in place of broad effect and truth to nature, must
+find it in stress of invention and resource of that kind.  Thus care and
+concentration must be all in all with him--he must never let himself go,
+or get so interested and taken with his characters that _they_, in a
+sense, control or direct him.  He is all too conscious a "maker" and must
+pay for his originality by what in the end is really painful and
+overweighted work.  This, I take it, is the reason why so many of the
+modern dramatists find their work so hard, and are, comparatively, so
+slow in the production of it, while they would fain, by many devices,
+secure the general impression or appeal made to all classes alike by the
+natural or what we may call spontaneous drama, they are yet, by the
+necessity of subject matter and methods of dealing with it, limited to
+the real interest of a special class--to whom is finally given up what
+was meant for mankind--and the troublesome and trying task laid on them,
+to try as best they may to reconcile two really conflicting tendencies
+which cannot even by art be reconciled but really point different ways
+and tend to different ends.  As the impressionist and the pre-Raphaelite,
+in the sister-art of painting cannot be combined and reconciled in one
+painter--so it is here; by conception and methods they go different ways,
+and if they _seek_ the same end, it is by opposing processes--the
+original conception alike of nature and of art dictating the process.
+
+As for Stevenson, it was no lack of care or concentration in anything
+that he touched; these two were never lacking, but because his subtlety,
+mystical bias and dreaminess, and theorising on human nature made this to
+him impossible.  He might have concentrated as much as he pleased,
+concentrated as much as even Mr Pinero desires, but he would not have
+made a successful drama, because he was Robert Louis Stevenson, and not
+Mr Pinero, and too long, as he himself confessed, had a tendency to think
+bad-heartedness was strength; while the only true and enduring joy
+attainable in this world--whether by deduction from life itself, or from
+_impressions_ of art or of the drama, is simply the steady, unassailable,
+and triumphant consciousness that it is not so, but the reverse, that
+goodness and self-sacrifice and self-surrender are the only strength in
+the universe.  Just as Byron had it with patriotism:--
+
+   "Freedom's battle once begun,
+   Bequeathed from bleeding sire to son,
+   Tho' baffled oft is ever won."
+
+To go consciously either in fiction or in the drama for bad-heartedness
+as strength, is to court failure--the broad, healthy, human heart, thank
+Heaven, is so made as to resent the doctrine; and if a fiction or a play
+based on this idea for the moment succeeds, it can only be because of
+strength in other elements, or because of partial blindness and partially
+paralysed moral sense in the case of those who accept it and joy in it.
+If Mr Pinero directly disputes this, then he and I have no common
+standing-ground, and I need not follow the matter any further.  Of
+course, the dramatist may, under mistaken sympathy and in the midst of
+complex and bewildering concatenations, give wrong readings to his
+audience, but he must not be always doing even that, or doing it on
+principle or system, else his work, however careful and concentrated,
+will before long share the fate of the Stevenson-Henley dramas
+confessedly wrought when the authors all too definitely held
+bad-heartedness was strength.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV--THEORY OF GOOD AND EVIL
+
+
+We have not hitherto concerned ourselves, in any express sense, with the
+ethical elements involved in the tendency now dwelt on, though they are,
+of necessity, of a very vital character.  We have shown only as yet the
+effect of this mood of mind on dramatic intention and effort.  The
+position is simply that there is, broadly speaking, the endeavour to
+eliminate an element which is essential to successful dramatic
+presentation.  That element is the eternal distinction, speaking broadly,
+between good and evil--between right and wrong--between the secret
+consciousness of having done right, and the consciousness of mere
+strength and force in certain other ways.
+
+Nothing else will make up for vagueness and cloudiness here--no technical
+skill, no apt dialogue nor concentration, any more than "fine speeches,"
+as Mr Pinero calls them.  Now the dramatic demand and the ethical demand
+here meet and take each other's hands, and will not be separated.  This
+is why Mr Stevenson and Mr Henley--young men of great talent,
+failed--utterly failed--they thought they could make a hero out of a
+shady and dare-devil yet really cowardly villain generally--and failed.
+
+The spirit of this is of the clever youth type--all too ready to forego
+the moral for the sake of the fun any day of the week, and the unthinking
+selfishness and self-enjoyment of youth--whose tender mercies are often
+cruel, are transcendent in it.  As Stevenson himself said, they were
+young men then and fancied bad-heartedness was strength.  Perhaps it was
+a sense of this that made R. L. Stevenson speak as he did of the _Ebb-
+Tide_ with Huish the cockney in it, after he was powerless to recall it;
+which made him say, as we have seen, that the closing chapters of _The
+Master of Ballantrae_ "_shame_, _and perhaps degrade_, _the beginning_."
+He himself came to see then the great error; but, alas! it was too late
+to remedy it--he could but go forward to essay new tales, not backward to
+put right errors in what was done.
+
+Did Mr William Archer have anything of this in his mind and the
+far-reaching effects on this side, when he wrote the following:
+
+   "Let me add that the omission with which, in 1885, I mildly reproached
+   him--the omission to tell what he knew to be an essential part of the
+   truth about life--was abundantly made good in his later writings.  It
+   is true that even in his final philosophy he still seems to me to
+   underrate, or rather to shirk, the significance of that most
+   compendious parable which he thus relates in a letter to Mr Henry
+   James:--'Do you know the story of the man who found a button in his
+   hash, and called the waiter?  "What do you call that?" says he.
+   "Well," said the waiter, "what d'you expect?  Expect to find a gold
+   watch and chain?"  Heavenly apologue, is it not?'  Heavenly, by all
+   means; but I think Stevenson relished the humour of it so much that he
+   'smiling passed the moral by.'  In his enjoyment of the waiter's
+   effrontery, he forgot to sympathise with the man (even though it was
+   himself) who had broken his teeth upon the harmful, unnecessary
+   button.  He forgot that all the apologetics in the world are based
+   upon just this audacious paralogism."
+
+Many writers have done the same--and not a few critics have hinted at
+this: I do not think any writer has got at the radical truth of it more
+directly, decisively, and clearly than "J. F. M.," in a monthly magazine,
+about the time of Stevenson's death; and the whole is so good and clear
+that I must quote it--the writer was not thinking of the drama specially;
+only of prose fiction, and this but makes the passage the more effective
+and apt to my point.
+
+   "In the outburst of regret which followed the death of Robert Louis
+   Stevenson, one leading journal dwelt on his too early removal in
+   middle life 'with only half his message delivered.'  Such a phrase may
+   have been used in the mere cant of modern journalism.  Still it set
+   one questioning what was Stevenson's message, or at least that part of
+   it which we had time given us to hear.
+
+   "Wonderful as was the popularity of the dead author, we are inclined
+   to doubt whether the right appreciation of him was half as wide.  To a
+   certain section of the public he seemed a successful writer of boys'
+   books, which yet held captive older people.  Now, undoubtedly there
+   was an element (not the highest) in his work which fascinated boys.  It
+   gratified their yearning for adventure.  To too large a number of his
+   readers, we suspect, this remains Stevenson's chief charm; though even
+   of those there were many able to recognise and be thankful for the
+   literary power and grace which could serve up their sanguinary diet so
+   daintily.
+
+   "Most of Stevenson's titles, too, like _Treasure Island_, _Kidnapped_,
+   and_ The Master of Ballantrae_, tended to foster delusion in this
+   direction.  The books were largely bought for gifts by maiden aunts,
+   and bestowed as school prizes, when it might not have been so had
+   their titles given more indication of their real scope and tendency.
+
+   "All this, it seems to us, has somewhat obscured Stevenson's true
+   power, which is surely that of an arch-delineator of 'human nature'
+   and of the devious ways of men.  As we read him we feel that we have
+   our finger on the pulse of the cruel politics of the world.  He has
+   the Shakespearean gift which makes us recognise that his pirates and
+   his statesmen, with their violence and their murders and their
+   perversions of justice, are swayed by the same interests and are
+   pulling the same strings and playing on the same passions which are at
+   work in quieter methods around ourselves.  The vast crimes and the
+   reckless bloodshed are nothing more nor less than stage effects used
+   to accentuate for the common eye what the seer can detect without
+   them.
+
+   "And reading him from this standpoint, Stevenson's 'message' (so far
+   as it was delivered) appears to be that of utter gloom--the creed that
+   good is always overcome by evil.  We do not mean in the sense that
+   good always suffers through evil and is frequently crucified by evil.
+   That is only the sowing of the martyr's blood, which is, we know, the
+   seed of the Church.  We should not have marvelled in the least that a
+   genius like Stevenson should rebel against mere external 'happy
+   endings,' which, being in flat contradiction to the ordinary ways of
+   Providence, are little short of thoughtless blasphemy against
+   Providence.  But the terrible thing about the Stevenson philosophy of
+   life is that it seems to make evil overcome good in the sense of
+   absorbing it, or perverting it, or at best lowering it.  When good and
+   evil come in conflict in one person, Dr Jekyll vanishes into Mr Hyde.
+   The awful Master of Ballantrae drags down his brother, though he seems
+   to fight for his soul at every step.  The sequel to _Kidnapped_ shows
+   David Balfour ready at last to be hail-fellow-well-met with the supple
+   Prestongrange and the other intriguers, even though they had forcibly
+   made him a partner to their shedding of innocent blood.
+
+   "Is it possible that this was what Stevenson's experience of real life
+   had brought him?  Fortunate himself in so many respects, he was yet
+   one of those who turn aside from the smooth and sunny paths of life,
+   to enter into brotherly sympathy and fellowship with the disinherited.
+   Is this, then, what he found on those darker levels?  Did he discover
+   that triumphant hypocrisy treads down souls as well as lives?
+
+   "We cannot doubt that it often does so; and it is well that we should
+   see this sometimes, to make us strong to contend with evil before it
+   works out this, its worst mischief, and to rouse us from the easy
+   optimist laziness which sits idle while others are being wronged, and
+   bids them believe 'that all will come right in the end,' when it is
+   our direct duty to do our utmost to make it 'come right' to-day.
+
+   "But to show us nothing but the gloomy side, nothing but the weakness
+   of good, nothing but the strength of evil, does not inspire us to
+   contend for the right, does not inform us of the powers and weapons
+   with which we might so contend.  To gaze at unqualified and inevitable
+   moral defeat will but leave us to the still worse laziness of
+   pessimism, uttering its discouraging and blasphemous cry, 'It does not
+   matter; nothing will ever come right!'
+
+   "Shakespeare has shown us--and never so nobly as in his last great
+   creation of _The Tempest_--that a man has one stronghold which none
+   but himself can deliver over to the enemy--that citadel of his own
+   conduct and character, from which he can smile supreme upon the foe,
+   who may have conquered all down the line, but must finally make pause
+   there.
+
+   "We must remember that _The Tempest_ was Shakespeare's last work.  The
+   genuine consciousness of the possible triumph of the moral nature
+   against every assault is probably reserved for the later years of
+   life, when, somewhat withdrawn from the passions of its struggle, we
+   become those lookers-on who see most of the game.  Strange fate is it
+   that so much of our genius vanishes into the great silence before
+   those later years are reached!"
+
+Stevenson was too late in awakening fully to the tragic error to which
+short-sighted youth is apt to wander that "bad-heartedness is strength."
+And so, from this point of view, to our sorrow, he too much verified
+Goethe's saw that "simplicity (not artifice) and repose are the acme of
+art, and therefore no youth can be a master."  In fact, he might very
+well from another side, have taken one of Goethe's fine sayings as a
+motto for himself:
+
+   "Greatest saints were ever most kindly-hearted to sinners;
+   Here I'm a saint with the best; sinners I never could hate." {7}
+
+Stevenson's own verdict on _Deacon Brodie_ given to a _New York Herald_
+reporter on the author's arrival in New York in September 1887, on the
+_Ludgate Hill_, is thus very near the precise truth: "The piece has been
+all overhauled, and though I have no idea whether it will please an
+audience, I don't think either Mr Henley or I are ashamed of it.  _But we
+were both young men when we did that_, _and I think we had an idea that
+bad-heartedness was strength_."
+
+If Mr Henley in any way confirmed R. L. Stevenson in this perversion, as
+I much fear he did, no true admirer of Stevenson has much to thank him
+for, whatever claims he may have fancied he had to Stevenson's eternal
+gratitude.  He did Stevenson about the very worst turn he could have
+done, and aided and abetted in robbing us and the world of yet greater
+works than we have had from his hands.  He was but condemning himself
+when he wrote some of the detractory things he did in the _Pall Mall
+Magazine_ about the _Edinburgh Edition_, etc.  Men are mirrors in which
+they see each other: Henley, after all, painted himself much more
+effectively in that now notorious _Pall Mall Magazine_ article than he
+did R. L. Stevenson.  Such is the penalty men too often pay for wreaking
+paltry revenges--writing under morbid memories and narrow and petty
+grievances--they not only fail in truth and impartiality, but inscribe a
+kind of grotesque parody of themselves in their effort to make their
+subject ridiculous, as he did, for example, about the name Lewis=Louis,
+and various other things.
+
+R. L. Stevenson's fate was to be a casuistic and mystic moralist at
+bottom, and could not help it; while, owing to some kink or twist, due,
+perhaps, mainly to his earlier sufferings, and the teachings he then
+received, he could not help giving it always a turn to what he himself
+called "tail-foremost" or inverted morality; and it was not till near the
+close that he fully awakened to the fact that here he was false to the
+truest canons at once of morality and life and art, and that if he
+pursued this course his doom was, and would be, to make his endings
+"disgrace, or perhaps, degrade his beginnings," and that no true and
+effective dramatic unity and effect and climax was to be gained.  Pity
+that he did so much on this perverted view of life and world and art: and
+well it is that he came to perceive it, even though almost too
+late:--certainly too late for that full presentment of that awful yet
+gladdening presence of a God's power and equity in this seeming tangled
+web of a world, the idea which inspired Robert Browning as well as
+Wordsworth, when he wrote, and gathered it up into a few lines in _Pippa
+Passes_:
+
+   "The year's at the spring,
+   And day's at the morn;
+   Morning's at seven;
+   The hillsides dew-pearled;
+
+   The lark's on the wing;
+   The snail's on the thorn:
+   God's in His heaven,
+   All's right with the world.
+
+   . . . . . . . . . . . .
+
+   "All service ranks the same with God,
+   If now, as formerly he trod
+   Paradise, His presence fills
+   Our earth, each only as God wills
+   Can work--God's puppets best and worst,
+   Are we; there is no last or first."
+
+It shows what he might have accomplished, had longer life been but
+allowed him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI--STEVENSON'S GLOOM
+
+
+The problem of Stevenson's gloom cannot be solved by any commonplace cut-
+and-dried process.  It will remain a problem only unless (1) his original
+dreamy tendency crossed, if not warped, by the fatalistic Calvinism which
+was drummed into him by father, mother, and nurse in his tender years, is
+taken fully into account; then (2) the peculiar action on such a nature
+of the unsatisfying and, on the whole, distracting effect of the bohemian
+and hail-fellow-well-met sort of ideal to which he yielded, and which has
+to be charged with much; and (3) the conflict in him of a keenly social
+animus with a very strong egotistical effusiveness, fed by fancy, and
+nourished by the enforced solitariness inevitable in the case of one who,
+from early years up, suffered from painful, and even crushing, disease.
+
+His text and his sermon--which may be shortly summed in the following
+sentence--be kind, for in kindness to others lies the only true pleasure
+to be gained in life; be cheerful, even to the point of egotistic self-
+satisfaction, for through cheerfulness only is the flow of this incessant
+kindliness of thought and service possible.  He was not in harmony with
+the actual effect of much of his creative work, though he illustrated
+this in his life, as few men have done.  He regarded it as the highest
+duty of life to give pleasure to others; his art in his own idea thus
+became in an unostentatious way consecrated, and while he would not have
+claimed to be a seer, any more than he would have claimed to be a saint,
+as he would have held in contempt a mere sybarite, most certainly a vein
+of unblamable hedonism pervaded his whole philosophy of life.  Suffering
+constantly, he still was always kindly.  He encouraged, as Mr Gosse has
+said, this philosophy by every resource open to him.  In practical life,
+all who knew him declared that he was brightness, naive fancy, and
+sunshine personified, and yet he could not help always, somehow, infusing
+into his fiction a pronounced, and sometimes almost fatal, element of
+gloom.  Even in his own case they were not pleasure-giving and failed
+thus in essence.  Some wise critic has said that no man can ever write
+well creatively of that in which in his early youth he had no knowledge.
+Always behind Stevenson's latest exercises lies the shadow of this as an
+unshifting background, which by art may be relieved, but never refined
+away wholly.  He cannot escape from it if he would.  Here, too, as George
+MacDonald has neatly and nicely said: We are the victims of our own past,
+and often a hand is put forth upon us from behind and draws us into life
+backward.  Here was Stevenson, with his half-hedonistic theories of life,
+the duty of giving pleasure, of making eyes brighter, and casting
+sunshine around one wherever one went, yet the creator of gloom for us,
+when all the world was before him where to choose.  This fateful shadow
+pursued him to the end, often giving us, as it were, the very
+justificative ground for his own father's despondency and gloom, which
+the son rather too decisively reproved, while he might have sympathised
+with it in a stranger, and in that most characteristic letter to his
+mother, which we have quoted, said that it made his father often seem, to
+him, to be ungrateful--"_Has the man no gratitude_?"  Two selves thus
+persistently and constantly struggled in Stevenson.  He was from this
+point of view, indeed, his own Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the buoyant, self-
+enjoying, because pleasure-conferring, man, and at the same time the
+helpless yet fascinating "dark interpreter" of the gloomy and
+gloom-inspiring side of life, viewed from the point of view of dominating
+character and inherited influence.  When he reached out his hand with
+desire of pleasure-conferring, lo and behold, as he wrote, a hand from
+his forefathers was stretched out, and he was pulled backward; so that,
+as he has confessed, his endings were apt to shame, perhaps to degrade,
+the beginnings.  Here is something pointing to the hidden and secret
+springs that feed the deeper will and bend it to their service.
+Individuality itself is but a mirror, which by its inequalities
+transforms things to odd shapes.  Hawthorne confessed to something of
+this sort.  He, like Stevenson, suffered much in youth, if not from
+disease then through accident, which kept him long from youthful company.
+At a time when he should have been running free with other boys, he had
+to be lonely, reading what books he could lay his hands on, mostly
+mournful and puritanic, by the borders of lone Sebago Lake.  He that hath
+once in youth been touched by this Marah-rod of bitterness will not
+easily escape from it, when he essays in later years to paint life and
+the world as he sees them; nay, the hand, when he deems himself freest,
+will be laid upon him from behind, if not to pull him, as MacDonald has
+said, into life backward, then to make him a mournful witness of having
+once been touched by the Marah-rod, whose bitterness again declares
+itself and wells out its bitterness when set even in the rising and the
+stirring of the waters.
+
+Such is our view of the "gloom" of Stevenson--a gloom which well might
+have justified something of his father's despondency.  He struggles in
+vain to escape from it--it narrows, it fatefully hampers and limits the
+free field of his art, lays upon it a strange atmosphere, fascinating,
+but not favourable to true dramatic breadth and force, and spontaneous
+natural simplicity, invariably lending a certain touch of weakness,
+inconsistency, and inconclusiveness to his endings; so that he himself
+could too often speak of them afterwards as apt to "shame, perhaps to
+degrade, the beginnings."  This is what true dramatic art should never
+do.  In the ending all that may raise legitimate question in the
+process--all that is confusing, perplexing in the separate parts--is met,
+solved, reconciled, at least in a way satisfactory to the general, or
+ordinary mind; and thus such unity is by it so gained and sealed, that in
+no case can the true artist, whatever faults may lie in portions of the
+process-work, say of his endings that "they shame, perhaps degrade, the
+beginning."  Wherever this is the case there will be "gloom," and there
+will also be a sad, tormenting sense of something wanting.  "The evening
+brings a 'hame';" so should it be here--should it especially be in a
+dramatic work.  If not, "We start; for soul is wanting there;" or, if not
+soul, then the last halo of the soul's serene triumph.  From this side,
+too, there is another cause for the undramatic character, in the stricter
+sense of Stevenson's work generally: it is, after all, distressful,
+unsatisfying, egotistic, for fancy is led at the beck of some
+pre-established disharmony which throws back an abiding and irremovable
+gloom on all that went before; and the free spontaneous grace of natural
+creation which ensures natural simplicity is, as said already, not quite
+attained.
+
+It was well pointed out in _Hammerton_, by an unanonymous author there
+quoted (pp. 22, 23), that while in the story, Hyde, the worse one, wins,
+in Stevenson himself--in his real life--Jekyll won, and not Mr Hyde.  This
+writer, too, might have added that the Master of Ballantrae also wins as
+well as Beau Austin and Deacon Brodie.  R. L. Stevenson's dramatic art
+and a good deal of his fiction, then, was untrue to his life, and on one
+side was a lie--it was not in consonance with his own practice or his
+belief as expressed in life.
+
+In some other matters the test laid down here is not difficult of
+application.  Stevenson, at the time he wrote _The Foreigner at Home_,
+had seen a good deal; he had been abroad; he had already had experiences;
+he had had differences with his father about Calvinism and some other
+things; and yet just see how he applies the standard of his earlier
+knowledge and observation to England--and by doing so, cannot help
+exaggerating the outstanding differences, always with an almost
+provincial accent of unwavering conviction due to his early associations
+and knowledge.  He cannot help paying an excessive tribute to the
+Calvinism he had formally rejected, in so far as, according to him, it
+goes to form character--even national character, at all events, in its
+production of types; and he never in any really effective way glances at
+what Mr Matthew Arnold called "Scottish manners, Scottish drink" as
+elements in any way radically qualifying.  It is not, of course, that I,
+as a Scotsman, well acquainted with rural life in some parts of England,
+as with rural life in many parts of Scotland in my youth, do not heartily
+agree with him--the point is that, when he comes to this sort of
+comparison and contrast, he writes exactly as his father would or might
+have done, with a full consciousness, after all, of the tribute he was
+paying to the practical outcome on character of the Calvinism in which he
+so thoroughly believed.  It is, in its way, a very peculiar thing--and
+had I space, and did I believe it would prove interesting to readers in
+general, I might write an essay on it, with instances--in which case the
+Address to the Scottish Clergy would come in for more notice, citation
+and application than it has yet received.  But meanwhile just take this
+little snippet--very characteristic and very suggestive in its own
+way--and tell me whether it does not justify and bear out fully what I
+have now said as illustrating a certain side and a strange uncertain
+limitation in Stevenson:
+
+   "But it is not alone in scenery and architecture that we count England
+   foreign.  The constitution of society, the very pillars of the empire,
+   surprise and even pain us.  The dull neglected peasant, sunk in
+   matter, insolent, gross and servile, makes a startling contrast to our
+   own long-legged, long-headed, thoughtful, Bible-loving ploughman.  A
+   week or two in such a place as Suffolk leaves the Scotsman gasping.  It
+   seems impossible that within the boundaries of his own island a class
+   should have been thus forgotten.  Even the educated and intelligent
+   who hold our own opinions and speak in our own words, yet seem to hold
+   them with a difference or from another reason, and to speak on all
+   things with less interest and conviction.  The first shock of English
+   society is like a cold plunge." {8}
+
+As there was a great deal of the "John Bull element" {9} in the little
+dreamer De Quincey, so there was a great deal, after all, of the rather
+conceited Calvinistic Scot in R. L. Stevenson, and it is to be traced as
+clearly in certain of his fictions as anywhere, though he himself would
+not perhaps have seen it and acknowledged it, as I am here forced now to
+see it, and to acknowledge it for him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII--PROOFS OF GROWTH
+
+
+Once again I quote Goethe:
+
+   "Natural simplicity and repose are the acme of art, and hence it
+   follows no youth can be a master."
+
+It has to be confessed that seldom, if ever, does Stevenson naturally and
+by sheer enthusiasm for subject and characters attain this natural
+simplicity, if he often attained the counterfeit presentment--artistic
+and graceful euphony, and new, subtle, and often unexpected
+concatenations of phrase.  Style is much; but it is not everything.  We
+often love Scott the more that he shows loosenesses and lapses here, for,
+in spite of them, he gains natural simplicity, while not seldom
+Stevenson, with all his art and fine sense of verbal music, rather misses
+it.  _The Sedulous Ape_ sometimes disenchants as well as charms; for
+occasionally a word, a touch, a turn, sends us off too directly in search
+of the model; and this operates against the interest as introducing a new
+and alien series of associations, where, for full effect, it should not
+be so.  And this distraction will be the more insistent, the more
+knowledge the reader has and the more he remembers; and since Stevenson's
+first appeal, both by his spirit and his methods, is to the cultured and
+well read, rather than to the great mass, his "sedulous apehood" only the
+more directly wars against him as regards deep, continuous, and lasting
+impression; where he should be most simple, natural and spontaneous; he
+also is most artificial and involved.  If the story-writer is not so much
+in earnest, not so possessed by his matter that this is allowed to him,
+how is it to be hoped that we shall be possessed in the reading of it?
+More than once in _Catriona_ we must own we had this experience, directly
+warring against full possession by the story, and certain passages about
+Simon Lovat were especially marked by this; if even the first
+introduction to Catriona herself was not so.  As for Miss Barbara Grant,
+of whom so much has been made by many admirers, she is decidedly clever,
+indeed too clever by half, and yet her doom is to be a mere _deus ex
+machina_, and never do more than just pay a little tribute to Stevenson's
+own power of _persiflage_, or, if you like, to pay a penalty, poor lass,
+for the too perfect doing of hat, and really, really, I could not help
+saying this much, though, I do believe that she deserved just a wee bit
+better fate than that.
+
+But we have proofs of great growth, and nowhere are they greater than at
+the very close.  Stevenson died young: in some phases he was but a youth
+to the last.  To a true critic then, the problem is, having already
+attained so much--a grand style, grasp of a limited group of characters,
+with fancy, sincerity, and imagination,--what would Stevenson have
+attained in another ten years had such been but allotted him?  It has
+over and over again been said that, for long he _shied_ presenting women
+altogether.  This is not quite true: _Thrawn Janet_ was an earlier
+effort; and if there the problem is persistent, the woman is real.  Here
+also he was on the right road--the advance road.  The sex-question was
+coming forward as inevitably a part of life, and could not be left out in
+any broad and true picture.  This element was effectively revived in
+_Weir of Hermiston_, and "Weir" has been well said to be sadder, if it
+does not go deeper than _Denis Duval_ or _Edwin Drood_.  We know what
+Dickens and Thackeray could do there; we can but guess now what Stevenson
+would have done.  "Weir" is but a fragment; but, to a wisely critical and
+unprejudiced mind, it suffices to show not only what the complete work
+would have been, but what would have inevitably followed it.  It shows
+the turning-point, and the way that was to be followed at the
+cross-roads--the way into a bigger, realer, grander world, where realism,
+freed from the dream, and fancy, and prejudice of youth, would glory in
+achieving the more enduring romance of manhood, maturity and humanity.
+
+Yes; there was growth--undoubted growth.  The questioning and severely
+moral element mainly due to the Shorter Catechism--the tendency to
+casuistry, and to problems, and wistful introspection--which had so
+coloured Stevenson's art up to the date of _The Master of Ballantrae_,
+and made him a great essayist, was passing in the satisfaction of assured
+insight into life itself.  The art would gradually have been transformed
+also.  The problem, pure and simple, would have been subdued in face of
+the great facts of life; if not lost, swallowed up in the grandeur,
+pathos, and awe of the tragedy clearly realised and presented.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII--EARLIER DETERMINATIONS AND RESULTS
+
+
+Stevenson's earlier determination was so distinctly to the symbolic, the
+parabolic, allegoric, dreamy and mystical--to treatment of the world as
+an array of weird or half-fanciful existences, witnessing only to certain
+dim spiritual facts or abstract moralities, occasionally inverted
+moralities--"tail foremost moralities" as later he himself named
+them--that a strong Celtic strain in him had been detected and dwelt on
+by acute critics long before any attention had been given to his
+genealogy on both sides of the house.  The strong Celtic strain is now
+amply attested by many researches.  Such phantasies as _The House of
+Eld_, _The Touchstone_, _The Poor Thing_, and _The Song of the Morrow_,
+published along with some fables at the end of an edition of _Dr Jekyll
+and Mr Hyde_, by Longman's, I think, in 1896, tell to the initiated as
+forcibly as anything could tell of the presence of this element, as
+though moonshine, disguising and transfiguring, was laid over all real
+things and the secret of the world and life was in its glamour: the
+shimmering and soft shading rendering all outlines indeterminate, though
+a great idea is felt to be present in the mind of the author, for which
+he works.  The man who would say there is no feeling for symbol--no
+phantasy or Celtic glamour in these weird, puzzling, and yet on all sides
+suggestive tales would thereby be declared inept, inefficient--blind to
+certain qualities that lie near to grandeur in fanciful literature, or
+the literature of phantasy, more properly.
+
+This power in weird and playful phantasy is accompanied with the gift of
+impersonating or embodying mere abstract qualities or tendencies in
+characters.  The little early sketch written in June 1875, titled _Good
+Content_, well illustrates this:
+
+   "Pleasure goes by piping: Hope unfurls his purple flag; and meek
+   Content follows them on a snow-white ass.  Here, the broad sunlight
+   falls on open ways and goodly countries; here, stage by stage,
+   pleasant old towns and hamlets border the road, now with high sign-
+   poles, now with high minster spires; the lanes go burrowing under
+   blossomed banks, green meadows, and deep woods encompass them about;
+   from wood to wood flock the glad birds; the vane turns in the variable
+   wind; and as I journey with Hope and Pleasure, and quite a company of
+   jolly personifications, who but the lady I love is by my side, and
+   walks with her slim hand upon my arm?
+
+   "Suddenly, at a corner, something beckons; a phantom finger-post, a
+   will o' the wisp, a foolish challenge writ in big letters on a brand.
+   And twisting his red moustaches, braggadocio Virtue takes the perilous
+   way where dim rain falls ever, and sad winds sigh.  And after him, on
+   his white ass, follows simpering Content.
+
+   "Ever since I walk behind these two in the rain.  Virtue is all
+   a-cold; limp are his curling feather and fierce moustache.  Sore
+   besmirched, on his jackass, follows Content."
+
+The record, entitled _Sunday Thoughts_, which is dated some five days
+earlier is naive and most characteristic, touched with the phantastic
+moralities and suggestions already indicated in every sentence; and rises
+to the fine climax in this respect at the close.
+
+   "A plague o' these Sundays!  How the church bells ring up the sleeping
+   past!  I cannot go in to sermon: memories ache too hard; and so I hide
+   out under the blue heavens, beside the small kirk whelmed in leaves.
+   Tittering country girls see me as I go past from where they sit in the
+   pews, and through the open door comes the loud psalm and the fervent
+   solitary voice of the preacher.  To and fro I wander among the graves,
+   and now look over one side of the platform and see the sunlit meadow
+   where the grown lambs go bleating and the ewes lie in the shadow under
+   their heaped fleeces; and now over the other, where the rhododendrons
+   flower fair among the chestnut boles, and far overhead the chestnut
+   lifts its thick leaves and spiry blossom into the dark-blue air.  Oh,
+   the height and depth and thickness of the chestnut foliage!  Oh, to
+   have wings like a dove, and dwell in the tree's green heart!
+
+   . . . . . . . .
+
+   "A plague o' these Sundays!  How the Church bells ring up the sleeping
+   past!  Here has a maddening memory broken into my brain.  To the door,
+   to the door, with the naked lunatic thought!  Once it is forth we may
+   talk of what we dare not entertain; once the intriguing thought has
+   been put to the door I can watch it out of the loophole where, with
+   its fellows, it raves and threatens in dumb show.  Years ago when that
+   thought was young, it was dearer to me than all others, and I would
+   speak with it always when I had an hour alone.  These rags that so
+   dismally trick forth its madness were once the splendid livery my
+   favour wrought for it on my bed at night.  Can you see the device on
+   the badge?  I dare not read it there myself, yet have a guess--'_bad
+   ware nicht_'--is not that the humour of it?
+
+   . . . . . . . . .
+
+   "A plague o' these Sundays!  How the Church bells ring up the sleeping
+   past!  If I were a dove and dwelt in the monstrous chestnuts, where
+   the bees murmur all day about the flowers; if I were a sheep and lay
+   on the field there under my comely fleece; if I were one of the quiet
+   dead in the kirkyard--some homespun farmer dead for a long age, some
+   dull hind who followed the plough and handled the sickle for
+   threescore years and ten in the distant past; if I were anything but
+   what I am out here, under the sultry noon, between the deep chestnuts,
+   among the graves, where the fervent voice of the preacher comes to me,
+   thin and solitary, through the open windows; _if I were what I was
+   yesterday_, _and what_, _before God_, _I shall be again to-morrow_,
+   _how should I outface these brazen memories_, _how live down this
+   unclean resurrection of dead hopes_!"
+
+Close associated with this always is the moralising faculty, which is
+assertive.  Take here the cunning sentences on _Selfishness and Egotism_,
+very Hawthornian yet quite original:
+
+   "An unconscious, easy, selfish person shocks less, and is more easily
+   loved, than one who is laboriously and egotistically unselfish.  There
+   is at least no fuss about the first; but the other parades his
+   sacrifices, and so sells his favours too dear.  Selfishness is calm, a
+   force of nature; you might say the trees were selfish.  But egotism is
+   a piece of vanity; it must always take you into its confidence; it is
+   uneasy, troublesome, seeking; it can do good, but not handsomely; it
+   is uglier, because less dignified, than selfishness itself."
+
+If Mr Henley had but had this clear in his mind he might well have quoted
+it in one connection against Stevenson himself in the _Pall Mall
+Magazine_ article.  He could hardly have quoted anything more apparently
+apt to the purpose.
+
+In the sphere of minor morals there is no more important topic.
+Unselfishness is too often only the most exasperating form of
+selfishness.  Here is another very characteristic bit:
+
+   "You will always do wrong: you must try to get used to that, my son.
+   It is a small matter to make a work about, when all the world is in
+   the same case.  I meant when I was a young man to write a great poem;
+   and now I am cobbling little prose articles and in excellent good
+   spirits.  I thank you. . . . Our business in life is not to succeed,
+   but to continue to fail, in good spirits."
+
+Again:
+
+   "It is the mark of good action that it appears inevitable in the
+   retrospect.  We should have been cut-throats to do otherwise.  And
+   there's an end.  We ought to know distinctly that we are damned for
+   what we do wrong; but when we have done right, we have only been
+   gentlemen, after all.  There is nothing to make a work about."
+
+The moral to _The House of Eld_ is incisive writ out of true
+experience--phantasy there becomes solemn, if not, for the nonce,
+tragic:--
+
+   "Old is the tree and the fruit good,
+   Very old and thick the wood.
+   Woodman, is your courage stout?
+   Beware! the root is wrapped about
+   Your mother's heart, your father's bones;
+   And, like the mandrake, comes with groans."
+
+The phantastic moralist is supreme, jauntily serious, facetiously
+earnest, most gravely funny in the whole series of _Moral Emblems_.
+
+   "Reader, your soul upraise to see,
+   In yon fair cut designed by me,
+   The pauper by the highwayside
+   Vainly soliciting from pride.
+   Mark how the Beau with easy air
+   Contemns the anxious rustic's prayer
+   And casting a disdainful eye
+   Goes gaily gallivanting by.
+   He from the poor averts his head . . .
+   He will regret it when he's dead."
+
+Now, the man who would trace out step by step and point by point, clearly
+and faithfully, the process by which Stevenson worked himself so far free
+of this his besetting tendency to moralised symbolism or allegory into
+the freer air of life and real character, would do more to throw light on
+Stevenson's genius, and the obstacles he had had to contend with in
+becoming a novelist eager to interpret definite times and character, than
+has yet been done or even faithfully attempted.  This would show at once
+Stevenson's wonderful growth and the saving grace and elasticity of his
+temperament and genius.  Few men who have by force of native genius gone
+into allegory or moralised phantasy ever depart out of that fateful and
+enchanted region.  They are as it were at once lost and imprisoned in it
+and kept there as by a spell--the more they struggle for freedom the more
+surely is the bewitching charm laid upon them--they are but like the fly
+in amber.  It was so with Ludwig Tieck; it was so with Nathaniel
+Hawthorne; it was so with our own George MacDonald, whose professedly
+real pictures of life are all informed of this phantasy, which spoils
+them for what they profess to be, and yet to the discerning cannot
+disguise what they really are--the attempts of a mystic poet and phantasy
+writer and allegoristic moralist to walk in the ways of Anthony Trollope
+or of Mrs Oliphant, and, like a stranger in a new land always looking
+back (at least by a side-glance, an averted or half-averted face which
+keeps him from seeing steadily and seeing whole the real world with which
+now he is fain to deal), to the country from which he came.
+
+Stevenson did largely free himself, that is his great achievement--had he
+lived, we verily believe, so marked was his progress, he would have been
+a great and true realist, a profound interpreter of human life and its
+tragic laws and wondrous compensations--he would have shown how to make
+the full retreat from fairyland without penalty of too early an escape
+from it, as was the case with Thomas the Rymer of Ercildoune, and with
+one other told of by him, and proved that to have been a dreamer need not
+absolutely close the door to insight into the real world and to art.  This
+side of the subject, never even glanced at by Mr Henley or Mr Zangwill or
+their _confreres_, yet demands, and will well reward the closest and most
+careful attention and thought that can be given to it.
+
+The parabolic element, with the whimsical humour and turn for paradoxical
+inversion, comes out fully in such a work as _Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_.
+There his humour gives body to his fancy, and reality to the
+half-whimsical forms in which he embodies the results of deep and earnest
+speculations on human nature and motive.  But even when he is professedly
+concerned with incident and adventure merely, he manages to communicate
+to his pages some touch of universality, as of unconscious parable or
+allegory, so that the reader feels now and then as though some thought,
+or motive, or aspiration, or weakness of his own were being there
+cunningly unveiled or presented; and not seldom you feel he has also
+unveiled and presented some of yours, secret and unacknowledged too.
+
+Hence the interest which young and old alike have felt in _Treasure
+Island_, _Kidnapped_, and _The Wrecker_--a something which suffices
+decisively to mark off these books from the mass with which superficially
+they might be classed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX--EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN'S ESTIMATE
+
+
+It should be clearly remembered that Stevenson died at a little over
+forty--the age at which severity and simplicity and breadth in art but
+begin to be attained.  If Scott had died at the age when Stevenson was
+taken from us, the world would have lacked the _Waverley Novels_; if a
+like fate had overtaken Dickens, we should not have had _A Tale of Two
+Cities_; and under a similar stroke, Goldsmith could not have written
+_Retaliation_, or tasted the bitter-sweet first night of _She Stoops to
+Conquer_.  At the age of forty-four Mr Thomas Hardy had probably not
+dreamt of _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_.  But what a man has already done
+at forty years is likely, I am afraid, to be a gauge as well as a promise
+of what he will do in the future; and from Stevenson we were entitled to
+expect perfect form and continued variety of subject, rather than a
+measurable dynamic gain.
+
+This is the point of view which my friend and correspondent of years ago,
+Mr Edmund Clarence Stedman, of New York, set out by emphasising in his
+address, as President of the meeting under the auspices of the Uncut
+Leaves Society in New York, in the beginning of 1895, on the death of
+Stevenson, and to honour the memory of the great romancer, as reported in
+the _New York Tribune_:
+
+   "We are brought together by tidings, almost from the Antipodes, of the
+   death of a beloved writer in his early prime.  The work of a romancer
+   and poet, of a man of insight and feeling, which may be said to have
+   begun but fifteen years ago, has ended, through fortune's sternest
+   cynicism, just as it seemed entering upon even more splendid
+   achievement.  A star surely rising, as we thought, has suddenly gone
+   out.  A radiant invention shines no more; the voice is hushed of a
+   creative mind, expressing its fine imagining in this, our peerless
+   English tongue.  His expression was so original and fresh from
+   Nature's treasure-house, so prodigal and various, its too brief flow
+   so consummate through an inborn gift made perfect by unsparing toil,
+   that mastery of the art by which Robert Louis Stevenson conveyed those
+   imaginings to us so picturesque, yet wisely ordered, his own romantic
+   life--and now, at last, so pathetic a loss which renews
+
+   "'The Virgilian cry,
+   The sense of tears in mortal things,'
+
+   that this assemblage has gathered at the first summons, in tribute to
+   a beautiful genius, and to avow that with the putting out of that
+   bright intelligence the reading world experiences a more than wonted
+   grief.
+
+   "Judged by the sum of his interrupted work, Stevenson had his
+   limitations.  But the work was adjusted to the scale of a possibly
+   long career.  As it was, the good fairies brought all gifts, save that
+   of health, to his cradle, and the gift-spoiler wrapped them in a
+   shroud.  Thinking of what his art seemed leading to--for things that
+   would be the crowning efforts of other men seemed prentice-work in his
+   case--it was not safe to bound his limitations.  And now it is as if
+   Sir Walter, for example, had died at forty-four, with the _Waverley
+   Novels_ just begun!  In originality, in the conception of action and
+   situation, which, however phantastic, are seemingly within reason,
+   once we breathe the air of his Fancyland; in the union of bracing and
+   heroic character and adventure; in all that belongs to tale-writing
+   pure and simple, his gift was exhaustless.  No other such charmer, in
+   this wise, has appeared in his generation.  We thought the stories,
+   the fairy tales, had all been told, but 'Once upon a time' meant for
+   him our own time, and the grave and gay magic of Prince Florizel in
+   dingy London or sunny France.  All this is but one of his provinces,
+   however distinctive.  Besides, how he buttressed his romance with
+   apparent truth!  Since Defoe, none had a better right to say: 'There
+   was one thing I determined to do when I began this long story, and
+   that was to tell out everything as it befell.'
+
+   "I remember delighting in two fascinating stories of Paris in the time
+   of Francois Villon, anonymously reprinted by a New York paper from a
+   London magazine.  They had all the quality, all the distinction, of
+   which I speak.  Shortly afterward I met Mr Stevenson, then in his
+   twenty-ninth year, at a London club, where we chanced to be the only
+   loungers in an upper room.  To my surprise he opened a
+   conversation--you know there could be nothing more unexpected than
+   that in London--and thereby I guessed that he was as much, if not as
+   far, away from home as I was.  He asked many questions concerning 'the
+   States'; in fact, this was but a few months before he took his
+   steerage passage for our shores.  I was drawn to the young Scotsman at
+   once.  He seemed more like a New-Englander of Holmes's Brahmin caste,
+   who might have come from Harvard or Yale.  But as he grew animated I
+   thought, as others have thought, and as one would suspect from his
+   name, that he must have Scandinavian blood in his veins--that he was
+   of the heroic, restless, strong and tender Viking strain, and
+   certainly from that day his works and wanderings have not belied the
+   surmise.  He told me that he was the author of that charming book of
+   gipsying in the Cevennes which just then had gained for him some
+   attentions from the literary set.  But if I had known that he had
+   written those two stories of sixteenth-century Paris--as I learned
+   afterwards when they reappeared in the _New Arabian Nights_--I would
+   not have bidden him good-bye as to an 'unfledged comrade,' but would
+   have wished indeed to 'grapple him to my soul with hooks of steel.'
+
+   "Another point is made clear as crystal by his life itself.  He had
+   the instinct, and he had the courage, to make it the servant, and not
+   the master, of the faculty within him.  I say he had the courage, but
+   so potent was his birth-spell that doubtless he could not otherwise.
+   Nothing commonplace sufficed him.  A regulation stay-at-home life
+   would have been fatal to his art.  The ancient mandate, 'Follow thy
+   Genius,' was well obeyed.  Unshackled freedom of person and habit was
+   a prerequisite; as an imaginary artist he felt--nature keeps her poets
+   and story-tellers children to the last--he felt, if he ever reasoned
+   it out, that he must gang his own gait, whether it seemed promising,
+   or the reverse, to kith, kin, or alien.  So his wanderings were not
+   only in the most natural but in the wisest consonance with his
+   creative dreams.  Wherever he went, he found something essential for
+   his use, breathed upon it, and returned it fourfold in beauty and
+   worth.  The longing of the Norseman for the tropic, of the pine for
+   the palm, took him to the South Seas.  There, too, strange secrets
+   were at once revealed to him, and every island became an 'Isle of
+   Voices.'  Yes, an additional proof of Stevenson's artistic mission lay
+   in his careless, careful, liberty of life; in that he was an artist no
+   less than in his work.  He trusted to the impulse which possessed
+   him--that which so many of us have conscientiously disobeyed and too
+   late have found ourselves in reputable bondage to circumstances.
+
+   "But those whom you are waiting to hear will speak more fully of all
+   this--some of them with the interest of their personal
+   remembrance--with the strength of their affection for the man beloved
+   by young and old.  In the strange and sudden intimacy with an author's
+   record which death makes sure, we realise how notable the list of
+   Stevenson's works produced since 1878; more than a score of books--not
+   fiction alone, but also essays, criticism, biography, drama, even
+   history, and, as I need not remind you, that spontaneous poetry which
+   comes only from a true poet.  None can have failed to observe that,
+   having recreated the story of adventure, he seemed in his later
+   fiction to interfuse a subtler purpose--the search for character, the
+   analysis of mind and soul.  Just here his summons came.  Between the
+   sunrise of one day and the sunset of the next he exchanged the forest
+   study for the mountain grave.  There, as he had sung his own wish, he
+   lies 'under the wide and starry sky.'  If there was something of his
+   own romance, so exquisitely capricious, in the life of Robert Louis
+   Stevenson, so, also, the poetic conditions are satisfied in his death,
+   and in the choice of his burial-place upon the top of Pala.  As for
+   the splendour of that maturity upon which we counted, now never to be
+   fulfilled on sea or land, I say--as once before, when the great New-
+   England romancer passed in the stillness of the night:
+
+   "'What though his work unfinished lies?  Half bent
+   The rainbow's arch fades out in upper air,
+      The shining cataract half-way down the height
+   Breaks into mist; the haunting strain, that fell
+         On listeners unaware,
+      Ends incomplete, but through the starry night
+   The ear still waits for what it did not tell.'"
+
+Dr Edward Eggleston finely sounded the personal note, and told of having
+met Stevenson at a hotel in New York.  Stevenson was ill when the
+landlord came to Dr Eggleston and asked him if he should like to meet
+him.  Continuing, he said:
+
+   "He was flat on his back when I entered, but I think I never saw
+   anybody grow well in so short a time.  It was a soul rather than a
+   body that lay there, ablaze with spiritual fire, good will shining
+   through everywhere.  He did not pay me any compliment about my work,
+   and I didn't pay him any about his.  We did not burn any of the
+   incense before each other which authors so often think it necessary to
+   do, but we were friends instantly.  I am not given to speedy
+   intimacies, but I could not help my heart going out to him.  It was a
+   wonderfully invested soul, no hedges or fences across his fields, no
+   concealment.  He was a romanticist; I was--well, I don't know exactly
+   what.  But he let me into the springs of his romanticism then and
+   there.
+
+   "'You go in your boat every day?' he asked.  'You sail?  Oh! to write
+   a novel a man must take his life in his hands.  He must not live in
+   the town.'  And so he spoke, in his broad way, of course, according to
+   the enthusiasm of the moment.
+
+   "I can't sound any note of pathos here to-night.  Some lives are so
+   brave and sweet and joyous and well-rounded, with such a completeness
+   about them that death does not leave imperfection.  He never had the
+   air of sitting up with his own reputation.  He let his books toss in
+   the waves of criticism and make their ports if they deserve to.  He
+   had no claptrap, no great cause, none of the disease of pruriency
+   which came into fashion with Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant.  He
+   simply told his story, with no condescension, taking the readers into
+   his heart and his confidence."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX--EGOTISTIC ELEMENT AND ITS EFFECTS
+
+
+From these sources now traced out by us--his youthfulness of spirit, his
+mystical bias, and tendency to dream--symbolisms leading to disregard of
+common feelings--flows too often the indeterminateness of Stevenson's
+work, at the very points where for direct interest there should be
+decision.  In _The Master of Ballantrae_ this leads him to try to bring
+the balances even as regards our interest in the two brothers, in so far
+justifying from one point of view what Mr Zangwill said in the quotation
+we have given, or, as Sir Leslie Stephen had it in his second series of
+the _Studies of a Biographer_:
+
+   "The younger brother in _The Master of Ballantrae_, who is
+   black-mailed by the utterly reprobate master, ought surely to be
+   interesting instead of being simply sullen and dogged.  In the later
+   adventures, we are invited to forgive him on the ground that his brain
+   has been affected: but the impression upon me is that he is sacrificed
+   throughout to the interests of the story [or more strictly for the
+   working out of the problem as originally conceived by the author].  The
+   curious exclusion of women is natural in the purely boyish stories,
+   since to a boy woman is simply an incumbrance upon reasonable modes of
+   life.  When in _Catriona_ Stevenson introduces a love story, it is
+   still unsatisfactory, because David Balfour is so much the undeveloped
+   animal that his passion is clumsy, and his charm for the girl
+   unintelligible.  I cannot feel, to say the truth, that in any of these
+   stories I am really among living human beings with whom, apart from
+   their adventures, I can feel any very lively affection or antipathy."
+
+In the _Ebb-Tide_ it is, in this respect, yet worse: the three heroes
+choke each other off all too literally.
+
+In his excess of impartiality he tones down the points and lines that
+would give the attraction of true individuality to his characters, and
+instead, would fain have us contented with his liberal, and even over-
+sympathetic views of them and allowances for them.  But instead of thus
+furthering his object, he sacrifices the whole--and his story becomes,
+instead of a broad and faithful human record, really a curiosity of
+autobiographic perversion, and of overweening, if not extravagant egotism
+of the more refined, but yet over-obtrusive kind.
+
+Mr Baildon thus hits the subjective tendency, out of which mainly this
+defect--a serious defect in view of interest--arises.
+
+   "That we can none of us be sure to what crime we might not descend, if
+   only our temptation were sufficiently acute, lies at the root of his
+   fondness and toleration for wrong-doers (p. 74).
+
+Thus he practically declines to do for us what we are unwilling or unable
+to do for ourselves.  Interest in two characters in fiction can never, in
+this artificial way, and if they are real characters truly conceived, be
+made equal, nor can one element of claim be balanced against another,
+even at the beck of the greatest artist.  The common sentiment, as we
+have seen, resents it even as it resents lack of guidance elsewhere.
+After all, the novelist is bound to give guidance: he is an authority in
+his own world, where he is an autocrat indeed; and can work out issues as
+he pleases, even as the Pope is an authority in the Roman Catholic world:
+he abdicates his functions when he declines to lead: we depend on him
+from the human point of view to guide us right, according to the heart,
+if not according to any conventional notion or opinion.  Stevenson's
+pause in individual presentation in the desire now to raise our sympathy
+for the one, and then for the other in _The Master of Ballantrae_, admits
+us too far into Stevenson's secret or trick of affected self-withdrawal
+in order to work his problem and to signify his theories, to the loss and
+utter confusion of his aims from the point of common dramatic and human
+interest.  It is the same in _Catriona_ in much of the treatment of James
+Mohr or More; it is still more so in not a little of the treatment of
+_Weir of Hermiston_ and his son, though there, happily for him and for
+us, there were the direct restrictions of known fact and history, and
+clearly an attempt at a truer and broader human conception unburdened by
+theory or egotistic conception.
+
+Everywhere the problem due to the desire to be overjust, so to say,
+emerges; and exactly in the measure it does so the source of true
+dramatic directness and variety is lost.  It is just as though
+Shakespeare were to invent a chorus to cry out at intervals about Iago--"a
+villain, bad lot, you see, still there's a great deal to be said for
+him--victim of inheritance, this, that and the other; and considering
+everything how could you really expect anything else now."  Thackeray was
+often weak from this same tendency--he meant Becky Sharp to be largely
+excused by the reader on these grounds, as he tries to excuse several
+others of his characters; but his endeavours in this way to gloss over
+"wickedness" in a way, do not succeed--the reader does not carry clear in
+mind as he goes along, the suggestions Thackeray has ineffectually set
+out and the "healthy hatred of scoundrels" Carlyle talked about has its
+full play in spite of Thackeray's suggested excuses and palliations, and
+all in his own favour, too, as a story-wright.
+
+Stevenson's constant habit of putting himself in the place of another,
+and asking himself how would I have borne myself here or there, thus
+limited his field of dramatic interest, where the subject should have
+been made pre-eminently in aid of this effect.  Even in Long John Silver
+we see it, as in various others of his characters, though there, owing to
+the demand for adventure, and action contributory to it, the defect is
+not so emphasised.  The sense as of a projection of certain features of
+the writer into all and sundry of his important characters, thus imparts,
+if not an air of egotism, then most certainly a somewhat constrained, if
+not somewhat artificial, autobiographical air--in the very midst of
+action, questions of ethical or casuistical character arise, all
+contributing to submerging individual character and its dramatic
+interests under a wave of but half-disguised autobiography.  Let
+Stevenson do his very best--let him adopt all the artificial disguises he
+may, as writing narrative in the first person, etc., as in _Kidnapped_
+and _Catriona_, nevertheless, the attentive reader's mind is constantly
+called off to the man who is actually writing the story.  It is as
+though, after all, all the artistic or artificial disguises were a mere
+mask, as more than once Thackeray represented himself, the mask partially
+moved aside, just enough to show a chubby, childish kind of transformed
+Thackeray face below.  This belongs, after all, to the order of
+self-revelation though under many disguises: it is creation only in its
+manner of work, not in its essential being--the spirit does not so to us
+go clean forth of itself, it stops at home, and, as if from a remote and
+shadowy cave or recess, projects its own colour on all on which it looks.
+
+This is essentially the character of the _mystic_; and hence the
+justification for this word as applied expressly to Stevenson by Mr
+Chesterton and others.
+
+   "The inner life like rings of light
+   Goes forth of us, transfiguring all we see."
+
+The effect of these early days, with the peculiar tint due to the
+questionings raised by religious stress and strain, persists with
+Stevenson; he grows, but he never escapes from that peculiar something
+which tells of childish influences--of boyish perversions and troubled
+self-examinations due to Shorter Catechism--any one who would view
+Stevenson without thought of this, would view him only from the
+outside--see him merely in dress and outer oddities.  Here I see definite
+and clear heredity.  Much as he differed from his worthy father in many
+things, he was like him in this--the old man like the son, bore on him
+the marks of early excesses of wistful self-questionings and painful
+wrestlings with religious problems, that perpetuated themselves in a
+quaint kind of self-revelation often masked by an assumed self-withdrawal
+or indifference which to the keen eye only the more revealed the real
+case.  Stevenson never, any more than his father, ceased to be interested
+in the religious questions for which Scotland has always had a
+_penchant_--and so much is this the case that I could wish Professor
+Sidney Colvin would even yet attempt to show the bearing of certain
+things in that _Address to the Scottish Clergy_ written when Stevenson
+was yet but a young man, on all that he afterwards said and did.  It
+starts in the _Edinburgh Edition_ without any note, comment, or
+explanation whatever, but in that respect the _Edinburgh Edition_ is not
+quite so complete as it might have been made.  In view of the point now
+before us, it is far more important than many of the other trifles there
+given, and wants explanation and its relation to much in the novels
+brought out and illustrated.  Were this adequately done, only new ground
+would be got for holding that Stevenson, instead of, as has been said,
+"seeing only the visible world," was, in truth, a mystical moralist, once
+and always, whose thoughts ran all too easily into parable and fable, and
+who, indeed, never escaped wholly from that atmosphere, even when writing
+of things and characters that seemed of themselves to be wholly outside
+that sphere.  This was the tendency, indeed, that militated against the
+complete detachment in his case from moral problems and mystical thought,
+so as to enable him to paint, as it were, with a free hand exactly as he
+saw; and most certainly not that he saw only the visible world.  The
+mystical element is not directly favourable to creative art.  You see in
+Tolstoy how it arrests and perplexes--how it lays a disturbing check on
+real presentation--hindering the action, and is not favourable to the
+loving and faithful representation, which, as Goethe said, all true and
+high art should be.  To some extent you see exactly the same thing in
+Nathaniel Hawthorne as in Tolstoy.  Hawthorne's preoccupations in this
+way militated against his character-power; his healthy characters who
+would never have been influenced as he describes by morbid ones yet are
+not only influenced according to him, but suffer sadly.  Phoebe Pyncheon
+in _The House of the Seven Gables_, gives sunshine to poor Hepzibah
+Clifford, but is herself never merry again, though joyousness was her
+natural element.  So, doubtless, it would have been with Pansie in
+_Doctor Dolliver_, as indeed it was with Zenobia and with the hero in the
+_Marble Faun_.  "We all go wrong," said Hawthorne, "by a too strenuous
+resolution to go right."  Lady Byron was to him an intolerably
+irreproachable person, just as Stevenson felt a little of the same
+towards Thoreau; notwithstanding that he was the "sunnily-ascetic," the
+asceticism and its corollary, as he puts it: the passion for individual
+self-improvement was alien in a way to Stevenson.  This is the position
+of the casuistic mystic moralist and not of the man who sees only the
+visible world.
+
+Mr Baildon says:
+
+   "Stevenson has many of the things that are wanting or defective in
+   Scott.  He has his philosophy of life; he is beyond remedy a moralist,
+   even when his morality is of the kind which he happily calls 'tail
+   foremost,' or as we may say, inverted morality.  Stevenson is, in
+   fact, much more of a thinker than Scott, and he is also much more of
+   the conscious artist, questionable advantage as that sometimes is.  He
+   has also a much cleverer, acuter mind than Scott, also a questionable
+   advantage, as genius has no greater enemy than cleverness, and there
+   is really no greater descent than to fall from the style of genius to
+   that of cleverness.  But Stevenson was too critical and alive to
+   misuse his cleverness, and it is generally employed with great effect
+   as in the diabolical ingenuities of a John Silver, or a Master of
+   Ballantrae.  In one sense Stevenson does not even belong to the school
+   of Scott, but rather to that of Poe, Hawthorne, and the Brontes, in
+   that he aims more at concentration and intensity, than at the easy,
+   quiet breadth of Scott."
+
+If, indeed, it should not here have been added that Stevenson's theory of
+life and conduct was not seldom too insistent for free creativeness, for
+dramatic freedom, breadth and reality.
+
+Now here I humbly think Mr Baldion errs about the cleverness when he
+criticises Stevenson for the _faux pas_ artistically of resorting to the
+piratic filibustering and the treasure-seeking at the close of _The
+Master of Ballantrae_, he only tells and tells plainly how cleverness
+took the place of genius there; as indeed it did in not a few
+cases--certainly in some points in the Dutch escapade in _Catriona_ and
+in not a few in _Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_.  The fault of that last story is
+simply that we seem to hear Stevenson chuckling to himself, "Ah, now,
+won't they all say at last how clever I am."  That too mars the _Merry
+Men_, whoever wrote them or part wrote them, and _Prince Otto_ would have
+been irretrievably spoiled by this self-conscious sense of cleverness had
+it not been for style and artifice.  In this incessant "see how clever I
+am," we have another proof of the abounding youthfulness of R. L.
+Stevenson.  If, as Mr Baildon says (p. 30), he had true child's horror of
+being put in fine clothes in which one must sit still and be good,
+_Prince Otto_ remains attractive in spite of some things and because of
+his fine clothes.  Neither Poe nor Hawthorne could have fallen to the
+piracy, and treasure-hunting of _The Master of Ballantrae_.
+
+"Far behind Scott in the power of instinctive, irreflective, spontaneous
+creation of character, Stevenson tells his story with more art and with a
+firmer grip on his reader."  And that is exactly what I, wishing to do
+all I dutifully can for Stevenson, cannot see.  His genius is in nearly
+all cases pulled up or spoiled by his all too conscious cleverness, and
+at last we say, "Oh Heavens! if he could and would but let himself go or
+forget himself what he might achieve."  But he doesn't--never does, and
+therefore remains but a second-rate creator though more and more the
+stylist and the artist.  This is more especially the case at the very
+points where writers like Scott would have risen and roused all the
+readers' interest.  When Stevenson reaches such points, he is always as
+though saying "See now how cleverly I'll clear that old and stereotyped
+style of thing and do something _new_."  But there are things in life and
+human nature, which though they are old are yet ever new, and the true
+greatness of a writer can never come from evading or looking askance at
+them or trying to make them out something else than what they really are.
+No artistic aim or ambition can suffice to stand instead of them or to
+refine them away.  That way lies only cold artifice and frigid lacework,
+and sometimes Stevenson did go a little too much on this line.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI--UNITY IN STEVENSON'S STORIES
+
+
+The unity in Stevenson's stories is generally a unity of subjective
+impression and reminiscence due, in the first place, to his quick, almost
+abnormal boyish reverence for mere animal courage, audacity, and
+doggedness, and, in the second place, to his theory of life, his
+philosophy, his moral view.  He produces an artificial atmosphere.
+Everything then has to be worked up to this--kept really in accordance
+with it, and he shows great art in the doing of this.  Hence, though, a
+quaint sense of sameness, of artificial atmosphere--at once really a lack
+of spontaneity and of freedom.  He is freest when he pretends to nothing
+but adventure--when he aims professedly at nothing save to let his
+characters develop themselves by action.  In this respect the most
+successful of his stories is yet _Treasure Island_, and the least
+successful perhaps _Catriona_, when just as the ambitious aim compels him
+to pause in incident, the first-person form creates a cold stiffness and
+artificiality alien to the full impression he would produce upon the
+reader.  The two stories he left unfinished promised far greater things
+in this respect than he ever accomplished.  For it is an indisputable
+fact, and indeed very remarkable, that the ordinary types of men and
+women have little or no attraction for Stevenson, nor their commonplace
+passions either.  Yet precisely what his art wanted was due infusion of
+this very interest.  Nothing else will supply the place.  The ordinary
+passion of love to the end he _shies_, and must invent no end of
+expedients to supply the want.  The devotion of the ordinary type, as
+Thomas Hardy has over and over exhibited it, is precisely what Stevenson
+wants, to impart to his novels the full sense of reality.  The secret of
+morals, says Shelley, is a going out of self.  Stevenson was only on the
+way to secure this grand and all-sufficing motive.  His characters, in a
+way, are all already like himself, romantic, but the highest is when the
+ordinary and commonplace is so apprehended that it becomes romantic, and
+may even, through the artist's deeper perception and unconscious grasp
+and vision, take the hand of tragedy, and lose nothing.  The very
+atmosphere Stevenson so loved to create was in itself alien to this; and,
+so far as he went, his most successful revelations were but records of
+his own limitations.  It is something that he was to the end so much the
+youth, with fine impulses, if sometimes with sympathies misdirected, and
+that, too, in such a way as to render his work cold and artificial, else
+he might have turned out more of the Swift than of the Sterne or
+Fielding.  Prince Otto and Seraphina are from this cause mainly complete
+failures, alike from the point of view of nature and of art, and the
+Countess von Rosen is not a complete failure, and would perhaps have been
+a bit of a success, if only she had made Prince Otto come nearer to
+losing his virtue.  The most perfect in style, perhaps, of all
+Stevenson's efforts it is yet most out of nature and truth,--a farce,
+felt to be disguised only when read in a certain mood; and this all the
+more for its perfections, just as Stevenson would have said it of a human
+being too icily perfect whom he had met.
+
+On this subject, Mr Baildon has some words so decisive, true, and final,
+that I cannot refrain from here quoting them:
+
+   "From sheer incapacity to retain it, Prince Otto loses the regard,
+   affection, and esteem of his wife.  He goes eavesdropping among the
+   peasantry, and has to sit silent while his wife's honour is coarsely
+   impugned.  After that I hold it is impossible for Stevenson to
+   rehabilitate his hero, and, with all his brilliant effects, he fails.
+   . . . I cannot help feeling a regret that such fine work is thrown
+   away on what I must honestly hold to be an unworthy subject.  The
+   music of the spheres is rather too sublime an accompaniment for this
+   genteel comedy Princess.  A touch of Offenbach would seem more
+   appropriate.  Then even in comedy the hero must not be the butt."  And
+   it must reluctantly be confessed that in Prince Otto you see in excess
+   that to which there is a tendency in almost all the rest--it is to
+   make up for lack of hold on human nature itself, by resources of style
+   and mere external technical art.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII--PERSONAL CHEERFULNESS AND INVENTED GLOOM
+
+
+Now, it is in its own way surely a very remarkable thing that Stevenson,
+who, like a youth, was all for _Heiterkeit_, cheerfulness, taking and
+giving of pleasure, for relief, change, variety, new impressions, new
+sensations, should, at the time he did, have conceived and written a
+story like _The Master of Ballantrae_--all in a grave, grey, sombre tone,
+not aiming even generally at what at least indirectly all art is
+conceived to aim at--the giving of pleasure: he himself decisively said
+that it "lacked all pleasurableness, and hence was imperfect in essence."
+A very strange utterance in face of the oft-repeated doctrine of the
+essays that the one aim of art, as of true life, is to communicate
+pleasure, to cheer and to elevate and improve, and in face of two of his
+doctrines that life itself is a monitor to cheerfulness and mirth.  This
+is true: and it is only explainable on the ground that it is youth alone
+which can exult in its power of accumulating shadows and dwelling on the
+dark side--it is youth that revels in the possible as a set-off to its
+brightness and irresponsibility: it is youth that can delight in its own
+excess of shade, and can even dispense with sunshine--hugging to its
+heart the memory of its own often self-created distresses and conjuring
+up and, with self-satisfaction, brooding over the pain and imagined
+horrors of a lifetime.  Maturity and age kindly bring their own
+relief--rendering this kind of ministry to itself no longer desirable,
+even were it possible.  _The Master of Ballantrae_ indeed marks the
+crisis.  It shows, and effectively shows, the other side of the adventure
+passion--the desire of escape from its own sombre introspections, which
+yet, in all its "go" and glow and glitter, tells by its very excess of
+their tendency to pass into this other and apparently opposite.  But
+here, too, there is nothing single or separate.  The device of piracy,
+etc., at close of _Ballantrae_, is one of the poorest expedients for
+relief in all fiction.
+
+Will in _Will o' the Mill_ presents another.  When at the last moment he
+decides that it is not worth while to get married, the author's then
+rather incontinent philosophy--which, by-the-bye, he did not himself act
+on--spoils his story as it did so much else.  Such an ending to such a
+romance is worse even than any blundering such as the commonplace
+inventor could be guilty of, for he would be in a low sense natural if he
+were but commonplace.  We need not therefore be surprised to find Mr
+Gwynn thus writing:
+
+   "The love scenes in _Weir of Hermiston_ are almost unsurpassable; but
+   the central interest of the story lies elsewhere--in the relations
+   between father and son.  Whatever the cause, the fact is clear that in
+   the last years of his life Stevenson recognised in himself an ability
+   to treat subjects which he had hitherto avoided, and was thus no
+   longer under the necessity of detaching fragments from life.  Before
+   this, he had largely confined himself to the adventures of roving men
+   where women had made no entrance; or, if he treated of a settled
+   family group, the result was what we see in _The Master of
+   Ballantrae_."
+
+In a word, between this work and _Weir of Hermiston_ we have the passage
+from mere youth to manhood, with its wider, calmer views, and its
+patience, inclusiveness, and mild, genial acceptance of types that before
+did not come, and could not by any effort of will be brought, within
+range or made to adhere consistently with what was already accepted and
+workable.  He was less the egotist now and more the realist.  He was not
+so prone to the high lights in which all seems overwrought, exaggerated;
+concerned really with effects of a more subdued order, if still the theme
+was a wee out of ordinary nature.  Enough is left to prove that
+Stevenson's life-long devotion to his art anyway was on the point of
+being rewarded by such a success as he had always dreamt of: that in the
+man's nature there was power to conceive scenes of a tragic beauty and
+intensity unsurpassed in our prose literature, and to create characters
+not unworthy of his greatest predecessors.  The blind stroke of fate had
+nothing to say to the lesson of his life, and though we deplore that he
+never completed his masterpieces, we may at least be thankful that time
+enough was given him to prove to his fellow-craftsmen, that such labour
+for the sake of art is not without art's peculiar reward--the triumph of
+successful execution.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII--EDINBURGH REVIEWERS' DICTA INAPPLICABLE TO LATER WORK
+
+
+From many different points of view discerning critics have celebrated the
+autobiographic vein--the self-revealing turn, the self-portraiture, the
+quaint, genial, yet really child-like egotistic and even dreamy element
+that lies like an amalgam, behind all Stevenson's work.  Some have even
+said, that because of this, he will finally live by his essays and not by
+his stories.  That is extreme, and is not critically based or justified,
+because, however true it may be up to a certain point, it is not true of
+Stevenson's quite latest fictions where we see a decided breaking through
+of the old limits, and an advance upon a new and a fresher and broader
+sphere of interest and character altogether.  But these ideas set down
+truly enough at a certain date, or prior to a certain date, are wrong and
+falsely directed in view of Stevenson's latest work and what it promised.
+For instance, what a discerning and able writer in the _Edinburgh Review_
+of July 1895 said truly then was in great part utterly inapplicable to
+the whole of the work of the last years, for in it there was grasp, wide
+and deep, of new possibilities--promise of clear insight, discrimination,
+and contrast of character, as well as firm hold of new and great human
+interest under which the egotistic or autobiographic vein was submerged
+or weakened.  The _Edinburgh Reviewer_ wrote:
+
+   "There was irresistible fascination in what it would be unfair to
+   characterise as egotism, for it came natural to him to talk frankly
+   and easily of himself. . . . He could never have dreamed, like Pepys,
+   of locking up his confidence in a diary.  From first to last, in
+   inconsecutive essays, in the records of sentimental touring, in
+   fiction and in verse, he has embodied the outer and the inner
+   autobiography.  He discourses--he prattles--he almost babbles about
+   himself.  He seems to have taken minute and habitual introspection for
+   the chief study in his analysis of human nature, as a subject which
+   was immediately in his reach, and would most surely serve his purpose.
+   We suspect much of the success of his novels was due to the fact that
+   as he seized for a substructure on the scenery and situations which
+   had impressed him forcibly, so in the characters of the most different
+   types, there was always more or less of self-portraiture.  The subtle
+   touch, eminently and unmistakably realistic, gave life to what might
+   otherwise have seemed a lay-figure. . . . He hesitated again and again
+   as to his destination; and under mistakes, advice of friends, doubted
+   his chances, as a story-writer, even after _Treasure Island_ had
+   enjoyed its special success. . . . We venture to think that, with his
+   love of intellectual self-indulgence, had he found novel-writing
+   really enjoyable, he would never have doubted at all.  But there comes
+   in the difference between him and Scott, whom he condemns for the
+   slovenliness of hasty workmanship.  Scott, in his best days, sat down
+   to his desk and let the swift pen take its course in inspiration that
+   seemed to come without an effort.  Even when racked with pains, and
+   groaning in agony, the intellectual machinery was still driven at a
+   high pressure by something that resembled an irrepressible instinct.
+   Stevenson can have had little or nothing of that inspiriting afflatus.
+   He did his painstaking work conscientiously, thoughtfully; he erased,
+   he revised, and he was hard to satisfy.  In short, it was his
+   weird--and he could not resist it--to set style and form before fire
+   and spirit."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV--MR HENLEY'S SPITEFUL PERVERSIONS
+
+
+More unfortunate still, as disturbing and prejudicing a sane and true and
+disinterested view of Stevenson's claims, was that article of his
+erewhile "friend," Mr W. E. Henley, published on the appearance of the
+_Memoir_ by Mr Graham Balfour, in the _Pall Mall Magazine_.  It was well
+that Mr Henley there acknowledged frankly that he wrote under a keen
+sense of "grievance"--a most dangerous mood for the most soberly critical
+and self-restrained of men to write in, and that most certainly Mr W. E.
+Henley was not--and that he owned to having lost contact with, and
+recognition of the R. L. Stevenson who went to America in 1887, as he
+says, and never came back again.  To do bare justice to Stevenson it is
+clear that knowledge of that later Stevenson was essential--essential
+whether it was calculated to deepen sympathy or the reverse.  It goes
+without saying that the Louis he knew and hobnobbed with, and nursed near
+by the Old Bristo Port in Edinburgh could not be the same exactly as the
+Louis of Samoa and later years--to suppose so, or to expect so, would
+simply be to deny all room for growth and expansion.  It is clear that
+the W. E. Henley of those days was not the same as the W. E. Henley who
+indited that article, and if growth and further insight are to be allowed
+to Mr Henley and be pleaded as his justification _cum_ spite born of
+sense of grievance for such an onslaught, then clearly some allowance in
+the same direction must be made for Stevenson.  One can hardly think that
+in his case old affection and friendship had been so completely
+submerged, under feelings of grievance and paltry pique, almost always
+bred of grievances dwelt on and nursed, which it is especially bad for
+men of genius to acknowledge, and to make a basis, as it were, for
+clearer knowledge, insight, and judgment.  In other cases the pleading
+would simply amount to an immediate and complete arrest of judgment.  Mr
+Henley throughout writes as though whilst he had changed, and changed in
+points most essential, his erewhile friend remained exactly where he was
+as to literary position and product--the Louis who went away in 1887 and
+never returned, had, as Mr W. E. Henley, most unfortunately for himself,
+would imply, retained the mastery, and the Louis who never came back had
+made no progress, had not added an inch, not to say a cubit, to his
+statue, while Mr Henley remained _in statu quo_, and was so only to be
+judged.  It is an instance of the imperfect sympathy which Charles Lamb
+finely celebrated--only here it is acknowledged, and the "imperfect
+sympathy" pled as a ground for claiming the full insight which only
+sympathy can secure.  If Mr Henley was fair to the Louis he knew and
+loved, it is clear that he was and could only be unjust to the Louis who
+went away in 1887 and never came back.
+
+   "At bottom Stevenson was an excellent fellow.  But he was of his
+   essence what the French call _personnel_.  He was, that is,
+   incessantly and passionately interested in Stevenson.  He could not be
+   in the same room with a mirror but he must invite its confidences
+   every time he passed it; to him there was nothing obvious in time and
+   eternity, and the smallest of his discoveries, his most trivial
+   apprehensions, were all by way of being revelations, and as
+   revelations must be thrust upon the world; he was never so much in
+   earnest, never so well pleased (this were he happy or wretched), never
+   so irresistible as when he wrote about himself.  _Withal_, _if he
+   wanted a thing_, _he went after it with an entire contempt of
+   consequences_.  _For these_, _indeed_, _the Shorter Catechism was ever
+   prepared to answer_; _so that whether he did well or ill_, _he was
+   safe to come out unabashed and cheerful_."
+
+Notice here, how undiscerning the mentor becomes.  The words put in
+"italics," unqualified as they are, would fit and admirably cover the
+character of the greatest criminal.  They would do as they stand, for
+Wainwright, for Dr Dodd, for Deeming, for Neil Cream, for Canham Read, or
+for Dougal of Moat Farm fame.  And then the touch that, in the Shorter
+Catechism, Stevenson would have found a cover or justification for it
+somehow!  This comes of writing under a keen sense of grievance; and how
+could this be truly said of one who was "at bottom an excellent fellow."
+W. Henley's ethics are about as clear-obscure as is his reading of
+character.  Listen to him once again--more directly on the literary
+point.
+
+   "To tell the truth, his books are none of mine; I mean that if I
+   wanted reading, I do not go for it to the _Edinburgh Edition_.  I am
+   not interested in remarks about morals; in and out of letters.  _I
+   have lived a full and varied life_, and my opinions are my own.  _So_,
+   _if I crave the enchantment of romance_, _I ask it of bigger men than
+   he_, _and of bigger books than his_: of _Esmond_ (say) and _Great
+   Expectations_, of _Redgauntlet_ and _Old Mortality_, _of La Reine
+   Margot_ and _Bragelonne_, of _David Copperfield_ and _A Tale of Two
+   Cities_; while if good writing and some other things be in my
+   appetite, are there not always Hazlitt and Lamb--to say nothing of
+   that globe of miraculous continents; which is known to us as
+   Shakespeare?  There is his style, you will say, and it is a fact that
+   it is rare, and _in the last_ times better, because much simpler than
+   in the first.  But, after all, his style is so perfectly achieved that
+   the achievement gets obvious: and when achievement gets obvious, is it
+   not by way of becoming uninteresting?  And is there not something to
+   be said for the person who wrote that Stevenson always reminded him of
+   a young man dressed the best he ever saw for the Burlington Arcade?
+   {10}  Stevenson's work in letters does not now take me much, and I
+   decline to enter on the question of his immortality; since that,
+   despite what any can say, will get itself settled soon or late, for
+   all time.  No--when I care to think of Stevenson it is not of R. L.
+   Stevenson--R. L. Stevenson, the renowned, the accomplished--executing
+   his difficult solo, but of the Lewis that I knew and loved, and
+   wrought for, and worked with for so long.  The successful man of
+   letters does not greatly interest me.  I read his careful prayers and
+   pass on, with the certainty that, well as they read, they were not
+   written for print.  I learn of his nameless prodigalities, and recall
+   some instances of conduct in another vein.  I remember, rather, the
+   unmarried and irresponsible Lewis; the friend, the comrade, the
+   _charmeur_.  Truly, that last word, French as it is, is the only one
+   that is worthy of him.  I shall ever remember him as that.  The
+   impression of his writings disappears; the impression of himself and
+   his talk is ever a possession. . . . Forasmuch as he was primarily a
+   talker, his printed works, like these of others after his kind, are
+   but a sop for posterity.  A last dying speech and confession (as it
+   were) to show that not for nothing were they held rare fellows in
+   their day."
+
+Just a month or two before Mr Henley's self-revealing article appeared in
+the _Pall Mall Magazine_, Mr Chesterton, in the _Daily News_, with almost
+prophetic forecast, had said:
+
+   "Mr Henley might write an excellent study of Stevenson, but it would
+   only be of the Henleyish part of Stevenson, and it would show a
+   distinct divergence from the finished portrait of Stevenson, which
+   would be given by Professor Colvin."
+
+And it were indeed hard to reconcile some things here with what Mr Henley
+set down of individual works many times in the _Scots and National
+Observer_, and elsewhere, and in literary judgments as in some other
+things there should, at least, be general consistency, else the search
+for an honest man in the late years would be yet harder than it was when
+Diogenes looked out from his tub!
+
+Mr James Douglas, in the _Star_, in his half-playful and suggestive way,
+chose to put it as though he regarded the article in the _Pall Mall
+Magazine_ as a hoax, perpetrated by some clever, unscrupulous writer,
+intent on provoking both Mr Henley and his friends, and Stevenson's
+friends and admirers.  This called forth a letter from one signing
+himself "A Lover of R. L. Stevenson," which is so good that we must give
+it here.
+
+   A LITERARY HOAX.
+   TO THE EDITOR OF THE _STAR_.
+
+   SIR--I fear that, despite the charitable scepticism of Mr Douglas,
+   there is no doubt that Mr Henley is the perpetrator of the saddening
+   Depreciation of Stevenson which has been published over his name.
+
+   What openings there are for reprisals let Mr Henley's conscience tell
+   him; but permit me to remind him of two or three things which R. L.
+   Stevenson has written concerning W. E. Henley.
+
+   First this scene in the infirmary at Edinburgh:
+
+   "(Leslie) Stephen and I sat on a couple of chairs, and the poor fellow
+   (Henley) sat up in his bed with his hair and beard all tangled, and
+   talked as cheerfully as if he had been in a king's palace, or the
+   great King's palace of the blue air.  He has taught himself two
+   languages since he has been lying there.  _I shall try to be of use to
+   him_."
+
+   Secondly, this passage from Stevenson's dedication of _Virginibus
+   Puerisque_ to "My dear William Ernest Henley":
+
+   "These papers are like milestones on the wayside of my life; and as I
+   look back in memory, there is hardly a stage of that distance but I
+   see you present with advice, reproof, or praise.  Meanwhile, many
+   things have changed, you and I among the rest; but I hope that our
+   sympathy, founded on the love of our art, and nourished by mutual
+   assistance, shall survive these little revolutions, undiminished, and,
+   with God's help, unite us to the end."
+
+   Thirdly, two scraps from letters from Stevenson to Henley, to show
+   that the latter was not always a depreciator of R. L. Stevenson's
+   work:
+
+   "1. I'm glad to think I owe you the review that pleased me best of all
+   the reviews I ever had. . . . To live reading such reviews and die
+   eating ortolans--sich is my aspiration.
+
+   "2. Dear lad,--If there was any more praise in what you wrote, I
+   think--(the editor who had pruned down Mr Henley's review of
+   Stevenson's _Prince Otto_) has done us both a service; some of it
+   stops my throat. . . . Whether (considering our intimate relations)
+   you would not do better to refrain from reviewing me, I will leave to
+   yourself."
+
+   And, lastly, this extract from the very last of Stevenson's letters to
+   Henley, published in the two volumes of _Letters_:
+
+   "It is impossible to let your new volume pass in silence.  I have not
+   received the same thrill of poetry since G. M.'s _Joy of Earth_
+   volume, and _Love in a Valley_; and I do not know that even that was
+   so intimate and deep. . . . I thank you for the joy you have given me,
+   and remain your old friend and present huge admirer, R. L. S."
+
+It is difficult to decide on which side in this literary friendship lies
+the true modesty and magnanimity?  I had rather be the author of the last
+message of R. L. Stevenson to W. E. Henley, than of the last words of W.
+E. Henley concerning R. L. Stevenson.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV--MR CHRISTIE MURRAY'S IMPRESSIONS
+
+
+MR CHRISTIE MURRAY, writing as "Merlin" in our handbook in the _Referee_
+at the time, thus disposed of some of the points just dealt with by us:
+
+   "Here is libel on a large scale, and I have purposely refrained from
+   approaching it until I could show my readers something of the spirit
+   in which the whole attack is conceived.  'If he wanted a thing he went
+   after it with an entire contempt for consequences.  For these, indeed,
+   the Shorter Catechist was ever prepared to answer; so that whether he
+   did well or ill, he was safe to come out unabashed and cheerful.'  Now
+   if Mr Henley does not mean that for the very express picture of a
+   rascal without a conscience he has been most strangely infelicitous in
+   his choice of terms, and he is one of those who make so strong a
+   profession of duty towards mere vocables that we are obliged to take
+   him _au pied de la lettre_.  A man who goes after whatever he wants
+   with an entire contempt of consequences is a scoundrel, and the man
+   who emerges from such an enterprise unabashed and cheerful, whatever
+   his conduct may have been, and justifies himself on the principles of
+   the Shorter Catechism, is a hypocrite to boot.  This is not the report
+   we have of Robert Louis Stevenson from most of those who knew him.  It
+   is a most grave and dreadful accusation, and it is not minimised by Mr
+   Henley's acknowledgment that Stevenson was a good fellow.  We all know
+   the air of false candour which lends a disputant so much advantage in
+   debate.  In Victor Hugo's tremendous indictment of Napoleon le Petit
+   we remember the telling allowance for fine horsemanship.  It spreads
+   an air of impartiality over the most mordant of Hugo's pages.  It is
+   meant to do that.  An insignificant praise is meant to show how a
+   whole Niagara of blame is poured on the victim of invective in all
+   sincerity, and even with a touch of reluctance.
+
+   "Mr Henley, despite his absurdities of ''Tis' and 'it were,' is a
+   fairly competent literary craftsman, and he is quite gifted enough to
+   make a plain man's plain meaning an evident thing if he chose to do
+   it.  But if for the friend for whom 'first and last he did share' he
+   can only show us the figure of one 'who was at bottom an excellent
+   fellow,' and who had 'an entire contempt' for the consequences of his
+   own acts, he presents a picture which can only purposely be obscured.
+   . . .
+
+   "All I know of Robert Louis Stevenson I have learned from his books,
+   and from one unexpected impromptu letter which he wrote to me years
+   ago in friendly recognition of my own work.  I add the testimonies of
+   friends who may have been of less actual service to him than Mr
+   Henley, but who surely loved him better and more lastingly.  These do
+   not represent him as the victim of an overweening personal vanity, nor
+   as a person reckless of the consequences of his own acts, nor as a
+   Pecksniff who consoled himself for moral failure out of the Shorter
+   Catechism.  The books and the friends amongst them show me an erratic
+   yet lovable personality, a man of devotion and courage, a loyal,
+   charming, and rather irresponsible person whose very slight faults
+   were counter-balanced many times over by very solid virtues. . . .
+
+   "To put the thing flatly, it is not a heroism to cling to mere
+   existence.  The basest of us can do that.  But it is a heroism to
+   maintain an equable and unbroken cheerfulness in the face of death.
+   For my own part, I never bowed at the literary shrine Mr Henley and
+   his friends were at so great pains to rear.  I am not disposed to
+   think more loftily than I ever thought of their idol.  But the Man--the
+   Man was made of enduring valour and childlike charm, and these will
+   keep him alive when his detractors are dead and buried."
+
+As to the Christian name, it is notorious that he was christened Robert
+Lewis--the Lewis being after his maternal grandfather--Dr Lewis Balfour.
+Some attempt has been made to show that the Louis was adopted because so
+many cousins and relatives had also been so christened; but the most
+likely explanation I have ever heard was that his father changed the name
+to Louis, that there might be no chance through it of any notion of
+association with a very prominent noisy person of the name of Lewis, in
+Edinburgh, towards whom Thomas Stevenson felt dislike, if not positive
+animosity.  Anyhow, it is clear from the entries in the register of
+pupils at the Edinburgh Academy, in the two years when Stevenson was
+there, that in early youth he was called Robert only; for in the school
+list for 1862 the name appears as Robert Stevenson, without the Lewis,
+while in the 1883 list it is given as Lewis Robert Stevenson.  Clearly if
+in earlier years Stevenson was, in his family and elsewhere, called
+_Robert_, there could have then arisen no risk of confusion with any of
+his relatives who bore the name of Lewis; and all this goes to support
+the view which I have given above.  Anyhow he ceased to be called Robert
+at home, and ceased in 1863 to be Robert on the Edinburgh Academy list,
+and became Lewis Robert.  Whether my view is right or not, he was
+thenceforward called Louis in his family, and the name uniformly spelt
+Louis.  What blame on Stevenson's part could be attached to this family
+determination it is hard to see--people are absolutely free to spell
+their names as they please, and the matter would not be worth a moment's
+attention, or the waste of one drop of ink, had not Mr Henley chosen to
+be very nasty about the name, and in the _Pall Mall Magazine_ article
+persisted in printing it Lewis as though that were worthy of him and of
+it.  That was not quite the unkindest cut of all, but it was as unkind as
+it was trumpery.  Mr Christie Murray neatly set off the trumpery spite of
+this in the following passage:
+
+   "Stevenson, it appears, according to his friend's judgment, was
+   'incessantly and passionately interested in Stevenson,' but most of us
+   are incessantly and passionately interested in ourselves.  'He could
+   not be in the same room with a mirror but he must invite its
+   confidences every time he passed it.'  I remember that George Sala,
+   who was certainly under no illusion as to his own personal aspect,
+   made public confession of an identical foible.  Mr Henley may not have
+   an equal affection for the looking-glass, but he is a very poor and
+   unimaginative reader who does not see him gloating over the god-like
+   proportions of the shadow he sends sprawling over his own page.  I
+   make free to say that a more self-conscious person than Mr Henley does
+   not live.  'The best and most interesting part of Stevenson's life
+   will never get written--even by me,' says Mr Henley.
+
+   "There is one curious little mark of animus, or one equally curious
+   affectation--I do not profess to know which, and it is most probably a
+   compound of the two--in Mr Henley's guardedly spiteful essay which
+   asks for notice.  The dead novelist signed his second name on his
+   title-pages and his private correspondence 'Louis.'  Mr Henley spells
+   it 'Lewis.'  Is this intended to say that Stevenson took an
+   ornamenting liberty with his own baptismal appellation?  If so, why
+   not say the thing and have done with it?  Or is it one of Mr Henley's
+   wilful ridiculosities?  It seems to stand for some sort of meaning,
+   and to me, at least, it offers a jarring hint of small spitefulness
+   which might go for nothing if it were not so well borne out by the
+   general tone of Mr Henley's article.  It is a small matter enough, God
+   knows, but it is precisely because it is so very small that it
+   irritates."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI--HERO-VILLAINS
+
+
+In truth, it must indeed be here repeated that Stevenson for the reason
+he himself gave about _Deacon Brodie_ utterly fails in that healthy
+hatred of "fools and scoundrels" on which Carlyle somewhat incontinently
+dilated.  Nor does he, as we have seen, draw the line between hero and
+villain of the piece, as he ought to have done; and, even for his own
+artistic purposes, has it too much all on one side, to express it simply.
+Art demands relief from any one phase of human nature, more especially of
+that phase, and even from what is morbid or exceptional.  Admitting that
+such natures, say as Huish, the cockney, in the _Ebb-Tide_ on the one
+side, and Prince Otto on the other are possible, it is yet absolutely
+demanded that they should not stand _alone_, but have their due
+complement and balance present in the piece also to deter and finally to
+tell on them in the action.  If "a knave or villain," as George Eliot
+aptly said, is but a fool with a circumbendibus, this not only wants to
+be shown, but to have that definite human counterpart and corrective; and
+this not in any indirect and perfunctory way, but in a direct and
+effective sense.  It is here that Stevenson fails--fails absolutely in
+most of his work, save the very latest--fails, as has been shown, in _The
+Master of Ballantrae_, as it were almost of perverse and set purpose, in
+lack of what one might call ethical decision which causes him to waver or
+seem to waver and wobble in his judgment of his characters or in his
+sympathy with them or for them.  Thus he fails to give his readers the
+proper cue which was his duty both as man and artist to have given.  The
+highest art and the lowest are indeed here at one in demanding moral
+poise, if we may call it so, that however crudely in the low, and however
+artistically and refinedly in the high, vice should not only not be set
+forth as absolutely triumphing, nor virtue as being absolutely,
+outwardly, and inwardly defeated.  It is here the same in the melodrama
+of the transpontine theatre as in the tragedies of the Greek dramatists
+and Shakespeare.  "The evening brings a' 'hame'" and the end ought to
+show something to satisfy the innate craving (for it is innate, thank
+Heaven! and low and high alike in moments of _elevated impression_,
+acknowledge it and bow to it) else there can scarce be true _denouement_
+and the sense of any moral rectitude or law remain as felt or
+acknowledged in human nature or in the Universe itself.
+
+Stevenson's toleration and constant sermonising in the essays--his desire
+to make us yield allowances all round is so far, it may be, there in
+place; but it will not work out in story or play, and declares the need
+for correction and limitation the moment that he essays artistic
+presentation--from the point of view of art he lacks at once artistic
+clearness and decision, and from the point of view of morality seems
+utterly loose and confusing.  His artistic quality here rests wholly in
+his style--mere style, and he is, alas! a castaway as regards discernment
+and reading of human nature in its deepest demands and laws.  Herein lies
+the false strain that has spoiled much of his earlier work, which renders
+really superficial and confusing and undramatic his professedly dramatic
+work--which never will and never can commend the hearty suffrages of a
+mixed and various theatrical audience in violating the very first rule of
+the theatre, and of dramatic creation.
+
+From another point of view this is my answer to Mr Pinero in regard to
+the failure of Stevenson to command theatrical success.  He confuses and
+so far misdirects the sympathies in issues which strictly are at once
+moral and dramatic.
+
+I am absolutely at one with Mr Baildon, though I reach my results from
+somewhat different grounds from what he does, when he says this about
+_Beau Austin_, and the reason of its failure--complete failure--on the
+stage:
+
+   "I confess I should have liked immensely to have seen [? to see] this
+   piece on the boards; for only then could one be quite sure whether it
+   could be made convincing to an audience and carry their sympathies in
+   the way the author intended.  Yet the fact that _Beau Austin_, in
+   spite of being 'put on' by so eminent an actor-manager as Mr Beerbohm
+   Tree, was no great success on the stage, is a fair proof that the
+   piece lacked some of the essentials, good or bad, of dramatic success.
+   Now a drama, like a picture or a musical composition, must have a
+   certain unity of key and tone.  You can, indeed, mingle comedy with
+   tragedy as an interlude or relief from the strain and stress of the
+   serious interest of the piece.  But you cannot reverse the process and
+   mingle tragedy with comedy.  Once touch the fine spun-silk of the
+   pretty fire-balloon of comedy with the tragic dagger, and it falls to
+   earth a shrivelled nothing.  And the reason that no melodrama can be
+   great art is just that it is a compromise between tragedy and comedy,
+   a mixture of tragedy with comedy and not comedy with tragedy.  So in
+   drama, the middle course, proverbially the safest, is in reality the
+   most dangerous.  Now I maintain that in _Beau Austin_ we have an
+   element of tragedy.  The betrayal of a beautiful, pure and
+   noble-minded woman is surely at once the basest act a man can be
+   capable of, and a more tragic event than death itself to the woman.
+   Richardson, in _Clarissa Harlowe_, is well aware of this, and is
+   perfectly right in making his _denouement_ tragic.  Stevenson, on the
+   other hand, patches up the matter into a rather tame comedy.  It is
+   even much tamer than it would have been in the case of Lovelace and
+   Clarissa Harlowe; for Lovelace is a strong character, a man who could
+   have been put through some crucial atonement, and come out purged and
+   ennobled.  But Beau Austin we feel is but a frip.  He endures a few
+   minutes of sharp humiliation, it is true, but to the spectator this
+   cannot but seem a very insufficient expiation, not only of the wrong
+   he had done one woman, but of the indefinite number of wrongs he had
+   done others.  He is at once the villain and the hero of the piece, and
+   in the narrow limits of a brief comedy this transformation cannot be
+   convincingly effected.  Wrongly or rightly, a theatrical audience,
+   like the spectators of a trial, demand a definite verdict and
+   sentence, and no play can satisfy which does not reasonably meet this
+   demand.  And this arises not from any merely Christian prudery or
+   Puritanism, for it is as true for Greek tragedy and other high forms
+   of dramatic art."
+
+The transformation of villain into hero, if possible at all, could only
+be convincingly effected in a piece of wide scope, where there was room
+for working out the effect of some great shock, upheaval of the nature,
+change due to deep and unprecedented experiences--religious conversion,
+witnessing of sudden death, providential rescue from great peril of
+death, or circumstance of that kind; but to be effective and convincing
+it needs to be marked and _fully justified_ in some such way; and no
+cleverness in the writer will absolve him from deference to this great
+law in serious work for presentation on the stage; if mere farces or
+little comedies may seem sometimes to contravene it, yet this--even
+this--is only in appearance.
+
+True, it is not the dramatists part _of himself_ to condemn, or to
+approve, or praise: he has to present, and to present various characters
+faithfully in their relation to each other, and their effect upon each
+other.  But the moral element cannot be expunged or set lightly aside
+because it is closely involved in the very working out and presentation
+of these relations, and the effect upon each other.  Character is vital.
+And character, if it tells in life, in influence and affection, must be
+made to tell directly also in the drama.  There is no escape from
+this--none; the dramatist is lopsided if he tries to ignore it; he is a
+monster if he is wholly blind to it--like the poet in _In Memoriam_,
+"Without a conscience or an aim."  Mr Henley, in his notorious, all too
+confessional, and yet rather affected article on Stevenson in the _Pall
+Mall Magazine_, has a remark which I confess astonished me--a remark I
+could never forget as coming from him.  He said that he "had lived a very
+full and varied life, and had no interest in remarks about morals."
+"Remarks about morals" are, nevertheless, in essence, the pith of all the
+books to which he referred, as those to which he turned in preference to
+the _Edinburgh Edition_ of R. L. Stevenson's works.  The moral element is
+implicit in the drama, and it is implicit there because it is implicit in
+life itself, or so the great common-sense conceives it and demands it.
+What we might call the asides proper of the drama, are "remarks about
+morals," nothing else--the chorus in the Greek tragedy gathered up
+"remarks about morals" as near as might be to the "remarks about morals"
+in the streets of that day, only shaped to a certain artistic
+consistency.  Shakespeare is rich in "remarks about morals," often coming
+near, indeed, to personal utterance, and this not only when Polonius
+addresses his son before his going forth on his travels.  Mr Henley here
+only too plainly confessed, indeed, to lack of that conviction and
+insight which, had he but possessed them, might have done a little to
+relieve _Beau Austin_ and the other plays in which he collaborated with
+R. L. Stevenson, from their besetting and fatal weakness.  The two
+youths, alas! thought they could be grandly original by despising, or
+worse, contemning "remarks about morals" in the loftier as in the lower
+sense.  To "live a full and varied life," if the experience derived from
+it is to have expression in the drama, is only to have the richer
+resource in "remarks about morals."  If this is perverted under any self-
+conscious notion of doing something spick-and-span new in the way of
+character and plot, alien to all the old conceptions, then we know our
+writers set themselves boldly at loggerheads with certain old-fashioned
+and yet older new-fashioned laws, which forbid the violation of certain
+common demands of the ordinary nature and common-sense; and for the lack
+of this, as said already, no cleverness, no resource, no style or graft,
+will any way make up.  So long as this is tried, with whatever
+concentration of mind and purpose, failure is yet inevitable, and the
+more inevitable the more concentration and less of humorous by-play,
+because genius itself, if it despises the general moral sentiment and
+instinct for moral proportion--an ethnic reward and punishment, so to
+say--is all astray, working outside the line; and this, if Mr Pinero will
+kindly excuse me, is the secret of the failure of these plays, and not
+want of concentration, etc., in the sense he meant, or as he has put it.
+
+Stevenson rather affected what he called "tail-foremost morality," a kind
+of inversion in the field of morals, as De Quincey mixed it up with tail-
+foremost humour in _Murder as a Fine Art_, etc., etc., but for all such
+perversions as these the stage is a grand test and corrector, and such
+perversions, and not "remarks about morals," are most strictly prohibited
+there.  Perverted subtleties of the sort Stevenson in earlier times
+especially much affected are not only amiss but ruinous on the stage; and
+what genius itself would maybe sanction, common-sense must reject and
+rigidly cut away.  Final success and triumph come largely by _this_ kind
+of condensation and concentration, and the stern and severe lopping off
+of the indulgence of the _egotistical_ genius, which is human discipline,
+and the best exponent of the doctrine of unity also.  This is the
+straight and the narrow way along which genius, if it walk but
+faithfully, sows as it goes in the dramatic pathway all the flowers of
+human passion, hope, love, terror, and triumph.
+
+I find it advisable, if not needful, here to reinforce my own
+impressions, at some points, by another quotation from Mr Baildon, if he
+will allow me, in which Stevenson's dependence in certain respects on the
+dream-faculty is emphasised, and to it is traced a certain tendency to a
+moral callousness or indifference which is one of the things in which the
+waking Stevenson transparently suffered now and then invasions from the
+dream-Stevenson--the result, a kind of spot, as we may call it, on the
+eye of the moral sense; it is a small spot; but we know how a very small
+object held close before the eye will wholly shut out the most lovely
+natural prospects, interposing distressful phantasmagoria, due to the
+strained and, for the time, morbid condition of the organ itself.  So, it
+must be confessed, it is to a great extent here.
+
+But listen to Mr Baildon:
+
+"In _A Chapter on Dreams_, Stevenson confesses his indebtedness to this
+still mysterious agency.  From a child he had been a great and vivid
+dreamer, his dreams often taking such frightful shape that he used to
+awake 'clinging in terror to the bedpost.'  Later in life his dreams
+continued to be frequent and vivid, but less terrifying in character and
+more continuous and systematic.  'The Brownies,' as he picturesquely
+names that 'sub-conscious imagination,' as the scientist would call it,
+that works with such surprising freedom and ingenuity in our dreams,
+became, as it were, _collaborateurs_ in his work of authorship.  He
+declares that they invented plots and even elaborated whole novels, and
+that, not in a single night or single dream, but continuously, and from
+one night to another, like a story in serial parts.  Long before this
+essay was written or published, I had been struck by this phantasmal
+dream-like quality in some of Stevenson's works, which I was puzzled to
+account for, until I read this extraordinary explanation, for explanation
+it undoubtedly affords.  Anything imagined in a dream would have a
+tendency, when retold, to retain something of its dream-like character,
+and I have on doubt one could trace in many instances and distinguish the
+dreaming and the waking Stevenson, though in others they may be blended
+beyond recognition.  The trouble with the Brownies or the dream-Stevenson
+_was his or their want of moral sense_, so that they sometimes presented
+the waking author with plots which he could not make use of.  Of this
+Stevenson gives an instance in which a complete story of marked ingenuity
+is vetoed through the moral impossibility of its presentment by a writer
+so scrupulous (and in some directions he is extremely scrupulous) as
+Stevenson was.  But Stevenson admits that his most famous story, _The
+Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_, was not only suggested by a
+dream, but that some of the most important and most criticised points,
+such as the matter of the powder, were taken direct from the dream.  It
+had been extremely instructive and interesting had he gone more into
+detail and mentioned some of the other stories into which the
+dream-element entered largely and pointed out its influence, and would
+have given us a better clue than we have or now ever can have.
+
+"Even in _The Suicide Club_ and the _Rajah's Diamond_, I seem to feel
+strongly the presence of the dream-Stevenson. . . . _At certain points
+one feels conscious of a certain moral callousness_, _such as marks the
+dream state_, _as in the murder of Colonel Geraldine's brother_, _the
+horror of which never seems to come fully home to us_.  But let no one
+suppose these stories are lacking in vividness and in strangely realistic
+detail; for this is of the very nature of dreaming at its height. . . .
+While the _dramatis personae_ play their parts with the utmost spirit
+while the story proceeds, they do not, as the past creations do, seem to
+survive this first contact and live in our minds.  This is particularly
+true of the women.  They are well drawn, and play the assigned parts well
+enough, but they do not, as a rule, make a place for themselves either in
+our hearts or memories.  If there is an exception it is Elvira, in
+_Providence and the Guitar_; but we remember her chiefly by the one
+picture of her falling asleep, after the misadventures of the night, at
+the supper-table, with her head on her husband's shoulder, and her hand
+locked in his with instinctive, almost unconscious tenderness."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII--MR G. MOORE, MR MARRIOTT WATSON AND OTHERS
+
+
+From our point of view it will therefore be seen that we could not have
+read Mr George Moore's wonderfully uncritical and misdirected diatribe
+against Stevenson in _The Daily Chronicle_ of 24th April 1897, without
+amusement, if not without laughter--indeed, we confess we may here quote
+Shakespeare's words, we "laughed so consumedly" that, unless for Mr
+Moore's high position and his assured self-confidence, we should not
+trust ourselves to refer to it, not to speak of writing about it.  It was
+a review of _The Secret Rose_ by W. B. Yeats, but it passed after one
+single touch to belittling abuse of Stevenson--an abuse that was
+justified the more, in Mr Moore's idea, because Stevenson was dead.  Had
+he been alive he might have had something to say to it, in the way, at
+least, of fable and moral.  And when towards the close Mr Moore again
+quotes from Mr Yeats, it is still "harping on my daughter" to undo
+Stevenson, as though a rat was behind the arras, as in _Hamlet_.
+"Stevenson," says he, "is the leader of these countless writers who
+perceive nothing but the visible world," and these are antagonistic to
+the great literature, of which Mr Yeats's _Secret Rose_ is a survival or
+a renaissance, a literature whose watchword should be Mr Yeats's
+significant phrase, "When one looks into the darkness there is always
+something there."  No doubt Mr Yeats's product all along the line ranks
+with the great literature--unlike Homer, according to Mr Moore, he never
+nods, though in the light of great literature, poor Stevenson is always
+at his noddings, and more than that, in the words of Leland's Hans
+Breitmann, he has "nodings on."  He is poor, naked, miserable--a mere
+pretender--and has no share in the makings of great literature.  Mr Moore
+has stripped him to the skin, and leaves him to the mercy of rain and
+storm, like Lear, though Lear had a solid ground to go on in self-aid,
+which Stevenson had not; he had daughters, and one of them was Cordelia,
+after all.  This comes of painting all boldly in black and white: Mr
+Yeats is white, R. L. Stevenson is black, and I am sure neither one nor
+other, because simply of their self-devotion to their art, could have
+subscribed heartily to Mr Moore's black art and white art theory.  Mr
+Yeats is hardly the truest modern Celtic artist I take him for, if he can
+fully subscribe to all this.
+
+Mr Marriott Watson has a little unadvisedly, in my view, too like
+ambition, fallen on 'tother side, and celebrated Stevenson as the master
+of the horrifying. {11}  He even finds the _Ebb-Tide_, and Huish, the
+cockney, in it richly illustrative and grand.  "There never was a more
+magnificent cad in literature, and never a more foul-hearted little
+ruffian.  His picture glitters (!) with life, and when he curls up on the
+island beach with the bullet in his body, amid the flames of the vitriol
+he had intended for another, the reader's shudder conveys something also,
+even (!) of regret."
+
+And well it may!  Individual taste and opinion are but individual taste
+and opinion, but the _Ebb-Tide_ and the cockney I should be inclined to
+cite as a specimen of Stevenson's all too facile make-believe, in which
+there is too definite a machinery set agoing for horrors for the horrors
+to be quite genuine.  The process is often too forced with Stevenson, and
+the incidents too much of the manufactured order, for the triumph of that
+simplicity which is of inspiration and unassailable.  Here Stevenson,
+alas! all too often, _pace_ Mr Marriott Watson, treads on the skirts of
+E. A. Poe, and that in his least composed and elevated artistic moments.
+And though, it is true, that "genius will not follow rules laid down by
+desultory critics," yet when it is averred that "this piece of work
+fulfils Aristotle's definition of true tragedy, in accomplishing upon the
+reader a certain purification of the emotions by means of terror and
+pity," expectations will be raised in many of the new generation, doomed
+in the cases of the more sensitive and discerning, at all events, not to
+be gratified.  There is a distinction, very bold and very essential,
+between melodrama, however carefully worked and staged, and that tragedy
+to which Aristotle was there referring.  Stevenson's "horrifying," to my
+mind, too often touches the trying borders of melodrama, and nowhere more
+so than in the very forced and unequal _Ebb-Tide_, which, with its rather
+doubtful moral and forced incident when it is good, seems merely to
+borrow from what had gone before, if not a very little even from some of
+what came after.  No service is done to an author like Stevenson by
+fatefully praising him for precisely the wrong thing.
+
+   "Romance attracted Stevenson, at least during the earlier part of his
+   life, as a lodestone attracts the magnet.  To romance he brought the
+   highest gifts, and he has left us not only essays of delicate humour"
+   (should this not be "essays _full of_" _or_ "characterised by"?) "and
+   sensitive imagination, but stories also which thrill with the
+   realities of life, which are faithful pictures of the times and
+   tempers he dealt with, and which, I firmly believe, will live so"
+   (should it not be "as"?) "long as our noble English language."
+
+Mr Marriott Watson sees very clearly in some things; but occasionally he
+misses the point.  The problem is here raised how two honest, far-seeing
+critics could see so very differently on so simple a subject.
+
+Mr Baildon says about the _Ebb-Tide_:
+
+   "I can compare his next book, the _Ebb-Tide_ (in collaboration with
+   Osbourne) to little better than a mud-bath, for we find ourselves, as
+   it were, unrelieved by dredging among the scum and dregs of humanity,
+   the 'white trash' of the Pacific.  Here we have Stevenson's masterly
+   but utterly revolting incarnation of the lowest, vilest, vulgarest
+   villainy in the cockney, Huish.  Stevenson's other villains shock us
+   by their cruel and wicked conduct; but there is a kind of fallen
+   satanic glory about them, some shining threads of possible virtue.
+   They might have been good, even great in goodness, but for the malady
+   of not wanting.  But Huish is a creature hatched in slime, his soul
+   has no true humanity: it is squat and toad-like, and can only spit
+   venom. . . . He himself felt a sort of revulsive after-sickness for
+   the story, and calls it in one passage of his _Vailima Letters_ 'the
+   ever-to-be-execrated _Ebb-Tide_' (pp.  178 and 184). . . . He repented
+   of it like a debauch, and, as with some men after a debauch, felt
+   cleared and strengthened instead of wrecked.  So, after what in one
+   sense was his lowest plunge, Stevenson rose to the greatest height.
+   That is the tribute to his virtue and strength indeed, but it does not
+   change the character of the _Ebb-Tide_ as 'the ever-to-be-execrated.'"
+
+Mr Baildon truly says (p. 49):
+
+   "The curious point is that Stevenson's own great fault, that tendency
+   to what has been called the 'Twopence-coloured' style, is always at
+   its worst in books over which he collaborated."
+
+"Verax," in one of his "Occasional Papers" in the _Daily News_ on "The
+Average Reader" has this passage:
+
+   "We should not object to a writer who could repeat Barrie in _A Window
+   in Thrums_, nor to one who would paint a scene as Louis Stevenson
+   paints Attwater alone on his South Sea island, the approach of the
+   pirates to the harbour, and their subsequent reception and fate.  All
+   these are surely specimens of brilliant writing, and they are
+   brilliant because, in the first place, they give truth.  The events
+   described must, in the supposed circumstances, and with the given
+   characters, have happened in the way stated.  Only in none of the
+   specimens have we a mere photograph of the outside of what took place.
+   We have great pictures by genius of the--to the prosaic eye--invisible
+   realities, as well as of the outward form of the actions.  We behold
+   and are made to feel the solemnity, the wildness, the pathos, the
+   earnestness, the agony, the pity, the moral squalor, the grotesque
+   fun, the delicate and minute beauty, the natural loveliness and
+   loneliness, the quiet desperate bravery, or whatever else any of these
+   wonderful pictures disclose to our view.  Had we been lookers-on, we,
+   the average readers, could not have seen these qualities for
+   ourselves.  But they are there, and genius enables us to see them.
+   Genius makes truth shine.
+
+   "Is it not, therefore, probable that the brilliancy which we average
+   readers do not want, and only laugh at when we get it, is something
+   altogether different?  I think I know what it is.  It is an attempt to
+   describe with words without thoughts, an effort to make readers see
+   something the writer has never seen himself in his mind's eye.  He has
+   no revelation, no vision, nothing to disclose, and to produce an
+   impression uses words, words, words, makes daub, daub, daub, without
+   any definite purpose, and certainly without any real, or artistic, or
+   definite effect.  To describe, one must first of all see, and if we
+   see anything the description of it will, as far as it is in us, come
+   as effortless and natural as the leaves on trees, or as 'the tender
+   greening of April meadows.'  I, therefore, more than suspect that the
+   brilliancy which the average reader laughs at is not brilliancy.  A
+   pot of flaming red paint thrown at a canvas does not make a picture."
+
+Now there is vision for outward picture or separate incident, which may
+exist quite apart from what may be called moral, spiritual, or even
+loftily imaginative conception, at once commanding unity and commanding
+it.  There can be no doubt of Stevenson's power in the former line--the
+earliest as the latest of his works are witnesses to it.  _The Master of
+Ballantrae_ abounds in picture and incident and dramatic situations and
+touches; but it lacks true unity, and the reason simply is given by
+Stevenson himself--that the "ending shames, perhaps degrades, the
+beginning," as it is in the _Ebb-Tide_, with the cockney Huish,
+"execrable."  "We have great pictures by genius of the--to the prosaic
+eye--invisible realities, as well as the outward form of the action."
+True, but the "invisible realities" form that from which true unity is
+derived, else their partial presence but makes the whole the more
+incomplete and lop-sided, if not indeed, top-heavy, from light weight
+beneath; and it is in the unity derived from this higher pervading, yet
+not too assertive "invisible reality," that Stevenson most often fails,
+and is, in his own words, "execrable"; the ending shaming, if not
+degrading, the beginning--"and without the true sense of pleasurableness;
+and therefore really imperfect _in essence_."  Ah, it is to be feared
+that Stevenson, viewing it in retrospect, was a far truer critic of his
+own work, than many or most of his all too effusive and admiring
+critics--from Lord Rosebery to Mr Marriott Watson.
+
+Amid the too extreme deliverances of detractors and especially of
+erewhile friends, become detractors or panegyrists, who disturb judgment
+by overzeal, which is often but half-blindness, it is pleasant to come on
+one who bears the balances in his hand, and will report faithfully as he
+has seen and felt, neither more nor less than what he holds is true.  Mr
+Andrew Lang wrote an article in the _Morning Post_ of 16th December 1901,
+under the title "Literary Quarrels," in which, as I think, he fulfilled
+his part in midst of the talk about Mr Henley's regrettable attack on
+Stevenson.
+
+   "Without defending the character of a friend whom even now I almost
+   daily miss, as that character was displayed in circumstances unknown
+   to me, I think that I ought to speak of him as I found him.  Perhaps
+   our sympathy was mainly intellectual.  Constantly do those who knew
+   him desire to turn to him, to communicate with him, to share with him
+   the pleasure of some idea, some little discovery about men or things
+   in which he would have taken pleasure, increasing our own by the
+   gaiety of his enjoyment, the brilliance of his appreciation.  We may
+   say, as Scott said at the grave of John Ballantyne, that he has taken
+   with him half the sunlight out of our lives.  That he was sympathetic
+   and interested in the work of others (which I understand has been
+   denied) I have reason to know.  His work and mine lay far apart: mine,
+   I think, we never discussed, I did not expect it to interest him.  But
+   in a fragmentary manuscript of his after his death I found the
+   unlooked for and touching evidence of his kindness.  Again, he once
+   wrote to me from Samoa about the work of a friend of mine whom he had
+   never met.  His remarks were ideally judicious, a model of serviceable
+   criticism.  I found him chivalrous as an honest boy; brave, with an
+   indomitable gaiety of courage; on the point of honour, a Sydney or a
+   Bayard (so he seemed to me); that he was open-handed I have reason to
+   believe; he took life 'with a frolic welcome.'  That he was
+   self-conscious, and saw himself as it were, from without; that he was
+   fond of attitude (like his own brave admirals) he himself knew well,
+   and I doubt not that he would laugh at himself and his habit of
+   'playing at' things after the fashion of childhood.  Genius is the
+   survival into maturity of the inspiration of childhood, and Stevenson
+   is not the only genius who has retained from childhood something more
+   than its inspiration.  Other examples readily occur to the memory--in
+   one way Byron, in another Tennyson.  None of us is perfect: I do not
+   want to erect an immaculate clay-cold image of a man, in marble or in
+   sugar-candy.  But I will say that I do not remember ever to have heard
+   Mr Stevenson utter a word against any mortal, friend or foe.  Even in
+   a case where he had, or believed himself to have, received some wrong,
+   his comment was merely humorous.  Especially when very young, his
+   dislike of respectability and of the _bourgeois_ (a literary
+   tradition) led him to show a kind of contempt for virtues which,
+   though certainly respectable, are no less certainly virtuous.  He was
+   then more or less seduced by the Bohemian legend, but he was
+   intolerant of the fudge about the rights and privileges of genius.  A
+   man's first business, he thought, was 'keep his end up' by his work.
+   If, what he reckoned his inspired work would not serve, then by
+   something else.  Of many virtues he was an ensample and an inspiring
+   force.  One foible I admit: the tendency to inopportune benevolence.
+   Mr Graham Balfour says that if he fell into ill terms with a man he
+   would try to do him good by stealth.  Though he had seen much of the
+   world and of men, this practice showed an invincible ignorance of
+   mankind.  It is improbable, on the doctrine of chances, that he was
+   always in the wrong; and it is probable, as he was human, that he
+   always thought himself in the right.  But as the other party to the
+   misunderstanding, being also human, would necessarily think himself in
+   the right, such secret benefits would be, as Sophocles says, 'the
+   gifts of foeman and unprofitable.'  The secret would leak out, the
+   benefits would be rejected, the misunderstanding would be embittered.
+   This reminds me of an anecdote which is not given in Mr Graham
+   Balfour's biography.  As a little delicate, lonely boy in Edinburgh,
+   Mr Stevenson read a book called _Ministering Children_.  I have a
+   faint recollection of this work concerning a small Lord and Lady
+   Bountiful.  Children, we know, like to 'play at' the events and
+   characters they have read about, and the boy wanted to play at being a
+   ministering child.  He 'scanned his whole horizon' for somebody to
+   play with, and thought he had found his playmate.  From the window he
+   observed street boys (in Scots 'keelies') enjoying themselves.  But
+   one child was out of the sports, a little lame fellow, the son of a
+   baker.  Here was a chance!  After some misgivings Louis hardened his
+   heart, put on his cap, walked out--a refined little figure--approached
+   the object of his sympathy, and said, 'Will you let me play with you?'
+   'Go to hell!' said the democratic offspring of the baker.  This lesson
+   against doing good by stealth to persons of unknown or hostile
+   disposition was, it seems, thrown away.  Such endeavours are apt to be
+   misconstrued."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII--UNEXPECTED COMBINATIONS
+
+
+The complete artist should not be mystical-moralist any more than the man
+who "perceives only the visible world"--he should not engage himself with
+problems in the direct sense any more than he should blind himself to
+their effect upon others, whom he should study, and under certain
+conditions represent, though he should not commit himself to any form of
+zealot faith, yet should he not be, as Lord Tennyson puts it in the
+Palace of Art:
+
+   "As God holding no form of creed,
+   But contemplating all,"
+
+because his power lies in the broadness of his humanity touched to fine
+issues whenever there is the seal at once of truth, reality, and passion,
+and the tragedy bred of their contact and conflict.
+
+All these things are to him real and clamant in the measure that they aid
+appeal to heart and emotion--in the measure that they may, in his hands,
+be made to tell for sympathy and general effect.  He creates an
+atmosphere in which each and all may be seen the more effectively, but
+never seen alone or separate, but only in strict relation to each other
+that they may heighten the sense of some supreme controlling power in the
+destinies of men, which with the ancients was figured as Fate, and for
+which the moderns have hardly yet found an enduring and exhaustive name.
+Character revealed in reference to that, is the ideal and the aim of all
+high creative art.  Stevenson's narrowness, allied to a quaint and
+occasionally just a wee pedantic finickiness, as we may call it--an over-
+elaborate, almost tricky play with mere words and phrases, was in so far
+alien to the very highest--he was too often like a man magnetised and
+moving at the dictates of some outside influence rather than according to
+his own freewill and as he would.
+
+Action in creative literary art is a _sine qua non_; keeping all the
+characters and parts in unison, that a true _denouement_, determined by
+their own tendencies and temperaments, may appear; dialogue and all
+asides, if we may call them so, being supererogatory and weak really
+unless they aid this and are constantly contributory to it.  Egotistical
+predeterminations, however artfully intruded, are, alien to the full
+result, the unity which is finally craved: Stevenson fails, when he does
+fail, distinctly from excess of egotistic regards; he is, as Henley has
+said, in the French sense, too _personnel_, and cannot escape from it.
+And though these personal regards are exceedingly interesting and indeed
+fascinating from the point of view of autobiographical study, they are,
+and cannot but be, a drawback on fiction or the disinterested revelation
+of life and reality.  Instead, therefore, of "the visible world," as the
+only thing seen, Stevenson's defect is, that between it and him lies a
+cloud strictly self-projected, like breath on a mirror, which dims the
+lines of reality and confuses the character marks, in fact melting them
+into each other; and in his sympathetic regards, causing them all to
+become too much alike.  Scott had more of the power of healthy
+self-withdrawal, creating more of a free atmosphere, in which his
+characters could freely move--though in this, it must be confessed, he
+failed far more with women than with men.  The very defects poor Carlyle
+found in Scott, and for which he dealt so severely with him, as sounding
+no depth, are really the basis of his strength, precisely as the absence
+of them were the defects of Goethe, who invariably ran his characters
+finally into the mere moods of his own mind and the mould of his errant
+philosophy, so that they became merely erratic symbols without hold in
+the common sympathy.  Whether _Walverwandschaften_, _Wilhelm Meister_, or
+_Faust_, it is still the same--the company before all is done are
+translated into misty shapes that he actually needs to label for our
+identification and for his own.  Even Mr G. H. Lewes saw this and could
+not help declaring his own lack of interest in the latter parts of
+Goethe's greatest efforts.  Stevenson, too, tends to run his characters
+into symbols--his moralist-fabulist determinations are too much for
+him--he would translate them into a kind of chessmen, moved or moving on
+a board.  The essence of romance strictly is, that as the characters will
+not submit themselves to the check of reality, the romancer may
+consciously, if it suits him, touch them at any point with the magic wand
+of symbol, and if he finds a consistency in mere fanciful invention it is
+enough.  Tieck's _Phantasus_ and George MacDonald's _Phantastes_ are
+ready instances illustrative of this.  But it is very different with the
+story of real life, where there is a definite check in the common-sense
+and knowledge of the reader, and where the highest victory always lies in
+drawing from the reader the admission--"that is life--life exactly as I
+have seen and known it.  Though I could never have put it so, still it
+only realises my own conception and observation.  That is something
+lovingly remembered and re-presented, and this master makes me lovingly
+remember too, though 'twas his to represent and reproduce with such
+vigor, vividness and truth that he carried me with him, exactly as though
+I had been looking on real men and women playing their part or their game
+in the great world."
+
+Mr Zangwill, in his own style, wrote:
+
+   "He seeks to combine the novel of character with the novel of
+   adventure; to develop character through romantic action, and to bring
+   out your hero at the end of the episode, not the fixed character he
+   was at the beginning, as is the way of adventure books, but a modified
+   creature. . . . It is his essays and his personality, rather than his
+   novels, that will count with posterity.  On the whole, a great
+   provincial writer.  Whether he has that inherent grip which makes a
+   man's provinciality the very source of his strength . . . only the
+   centuries can show.
+
+The romanticist to the end pursued Stevenson--he could not, wholly or at
+once, shake off the bonds in which he had bound himself to his first
+love, and it was the romanticist crossed by the casuist, and the
+mystic--Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Markheim and Will of the Mill, insisted on
+his acknowledging them in his work up to the end.  _The modified
+creature_ at the end of Mr Zangwill was modified too directly by the
+egotistic element as well as through the romantic action, and this point
+missed the great defect was missed, and Mr Zangwill spoke only in
+generals.
+
+M. Schwob, after having related how unreal a real sheep's heart looked
+when introduced on the end of Giovanni's dagger in a French performance
+of John Ford's _Annabella and Giovanni_, and how at the next performance
+the audience was duly thrilled when Annabella's bleeding heart, made of a
+bit of red flannel, was borne upon the stage, goes on to say
+significantly:
+
+   "Il me semble que les personnages de Stevenson ont justement cette
+   espece de realisme irreal.  La large figure luisante de Long John, la
+   couleur bleme du crane de Thevenin Pensete s'attachent a la memoire de
+   nos yeux en vertue de leur irrealite meme.  Ce sont des fantomes de la
+   verite, hallucinants comme de vrais fantomes.  Notez en passant que
+   les traits de John Silver hallucinent Jim Hawkins, et que Francois
+   Villon est hante par l'aspect de Thevenin Pensete."
+
+Perhaps the most notable fact arising here, and one that well deserves
+celebration, is this, that Stevenson's development towards a broader and
+more natural creation was coincident with a definite return on the
+religious views which had so powerfully prevailed with his father--a
+circumstance which it is to be feared did not, any more than some other
+changes in him, at all commend itself to Mr Henley, though he had
+deliberately dubbed him even in the times of nursing nigh to the Old
+Bristo Port in Edinburgh--something of "Shorter Catechist." Anyway Miss
+Simpson deliberately wrote:
+
+   "Mr Henley takes exception to Stevenson's later phase in life--what he
+   calls his 'Shorter Catechism phase.'  It should be remembered that Mr
+   Henley is not a Scotsman, and in some things has little sympathy with
+   Scotch characteristics.  Stevenson, in his Samoan days, harked back to
+   the teaching of his youth; the tenets of the Shorter Catechism, which
+   his mother and nurse had dinned into his head, were not forgotten.  Mr
+   Henley knew him best, as Stevenson says in the preface to _Virginibus
+   Puerisque_ dedicated to Henley, 'when he lived his life at
+   twenty-five.'  In these days he had [in some degree] forgotten about
+   the Shorter Catechism, but the 'solemn pause' between Saturday and
+   Monday came back in full force to R. L. Stevenson in Samoa."
+
+Now to me that is a most suggestive and significant fact.  It will be the
+business of future critics to show in how far such falling back would of
+necessity modify what Mr Baildon has set down as his corner-stone of
+morality, and how far it was bound to modify the atmosphere--the purely
+egotistic, hedonistic, and artistic atmosphere, in which, in his earlier
+life as a novelist, at all events, he had been, on the whole, for long
+whiles content to work.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX--LOVE OF VAGABONDS
+
+
+What is very remarkable in Stevenson is that a man who was so much the
+dreamer of dreams--the mystic moralist, the constant questioner and
+speculator on human destiny and human perversity, and the riddles that
+arise on the search for the threads of motive and incentives to human
+action--moreover, a man, who constantly suffered from one of the most
+trying and weakening forms of ill-health--should have been so
+full-blooded, as it were, so keen for contact with all forms of human
+life and character, what is called the rougher and coarser being by no
+means excluded.  Not only this: he was himself a rover--seeking daily
+adventure and contact with men and women of alien habit and taste and
+liking.  His patience is supported by his humour.  He was a bit of a
+vagabond in the good sense of the word, and always going round in search
+of "honest men," like Diogenes, and with no tub to retire into or the
+desire for it.  He thus on this side touches the Chaucers and their
+kindred, as well as the Spensers and Dantes and their often illusive
+_confreres_.  His voyage as a steerage passenger across the Atlantic is
+only one out of a whole chapter of such episodes, and is more significant
+and characteristic even than the _Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes_
+or the _Inland Voyage_.  These might be ranked with the "Sentimental
+Journeys" that have sometimes been the fashion--that was truly of a
+prosaic and risky order.  The appeal thus made to an element deep in the
+English nature will do much to keep his memory green in the hearts that
+could not rise to appreciation of his style and literary gifts at all.  He
+loves the roadways and the by-ways, and those to be met with there--like
+him in this, though unlike him in most else.  The love of the roadsides
+and the greenwood--and the queer miscellany of life there unfolded and
+ever changing--a kind of gipsy-like longing for the tent and familiar
+contact with nature and rude human-nature in the open dates from beyond
+Chaucer, and remains and will have gratification--the longing for novelty
+and all the accidents, as it were, of pilgrimage and rude social travel.
+You see it bubble up, like a true and new nature-spring, through all the
+surface coatings of culture and artificiality, in Stevenson.  He anew,
+without pretence, enlivens it--makes it first a part of himself, and then
+a part of literature once more.  Listen to him, as he sincerely sings
+this passion for the pilgrimage--or the modern phase of it--innocent
+vagabond roving:
+
+   "Give to me the life I love,
+      Let the lave go by me;
+   Give the jolly heaven above,
+      And the by-way nigh me:
+   Bed in the bush, with stars to see;
+      Bread I dip in the river--
+   Here's the life for a man like me,
+      Here's the life for ever. . . .
+
+   "Let the blow fall soon or late;
+      Let what will be o'er me;
+   Give the face of earth around
+      And the road before me.
+   Health I ask not, hope nor love,
+      Nor a friend to know me:
+   All I ask the heaven above,
+      And the road below me."
+
+True; this is put in the mouth of another, but Stevenson could not have
+so voiced it, had he not been the born rover that he was, with longing
+for the roadside, the high hills, and forests and newcomers and varied
+miscellaneous company.  Here he does more directly speak in his own
+person and quite to the same effect:
+
+   "I will make you brooches and toys for your delight
+   Of bird song at morning, and star shine at night,
+   I will make a palace fit for you and me,
+   Of green days in forests and blue days at sea.
+
+   "I will make my kitchen, and you shall keep your room,
+   Where white flows the river, and bright blows the broom,
+   And you shall wash your linen and keep your body white,
+   In rainfall at morning and dew-fall at night.
+
+   "And this shall be for music when no one else is near,
+   The fine song for singing, the rare song to hear!
+   That only I remember, that only you admire,
+   Of the broad road that stretches, and the roadside fire."
+
+Here Stevenson, though original in his vein and way, but follows a great
+and gracious company in which Fielding and Sterne and so many others
+stand as pleasant proctors.  Scott and Dickens have each in their way
+essayed it, and made much of it beyond what mere sentiment would have
+reached.  _Pickwick_ itself--and we must always regard Dickens as having
+himself gone already over every bit of road, described every nook and
+corner, and tried every resource--is a vagrant fellow, in a group of
+erratic and most quaint wanderers or pilgrims.  This is but a return
+phase of it; Vincent Crummles and Mrs Crummles and the "Infant
+Phenomenon," yet another.  The whole interest lies in the roadways, and
+the little inns, and the odd and unexpected _rencontres_ with
+oddly-assorted fellows there experienced: glimpses of grim or grimy, or
+forbidding, or happy, smiling smirking vagrants, and out-at-elbows fellow-
+passengers and guests, with jests and quips and cranks, and hanky-panky
+even.  On high roads and in inns, and alehouses, with travelling players,
+rogues and tramps, Dickens was quite at home; and what is yet more, he
+made us all quite at home with them: and he did it as Chaucer did it by
+thorough good spirits and "hail-fellow-well-met."  And, with all his
+faults, he has this merit as well as some others, that he went willingly
+on pilgrimage always, and took others, promoting always love of comrades,
+fun, and humorous by-play.  The latest great romancer, too, took his
+side: like Dickens, he was here full brother of Dan Chaucer, and followed
+him.  How characteristic it is when he tells Mr Trigg that he preferred
+Samoa to Honolulu because it was more savage, and therefore yielded more
+_fun_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX--LORD ROSEBERY'S CASE
+
+
+Immediately on reading Lord Rosebery's address as Chairman of the meeting
+in Edinburgh to promote the erection of a monument to R. L. Stevenson, I
+wrote to him politely asking him whether, since he quoted a passage from
+a somewhat early essay by Stevenson naming the authors who had chiefly
+influenced him in point of style, his Lordship should not, merely in
+justice and for the sake of balance, have referred to Thoreau.  I also
+remarked that Stevenson's later style sometimes showed too much
+self-conscious conflict of his various models in his mind while he was in
+the act of writing, and that this now and then imparted too much an air
+of artifice to his later compositions, and that those who knew most would
+be most troubled by it.  Of that letter, I much regret now that I did not
+keep any copy; but I think I did incidentally refer to the friendship
+with which Stevenson had for so many years honoured me.  This is a copy
+of the letter received in reply:
+
+   "38 BERKELEY SQUARE, W.,
+   17_th_ _December_ 1896.
+
+   "DEAR SIR,--I am much obliged for your letter, and can only state that
+   the name of Thoreau was not mentioned by Stevenson himself, and
+   therefore I could not cite it in my quotation.
+
+   "With regard to the style of Stevenson's later works, I am inclined to
+   agree with you.-Believe me, yours very faithfully,
+
+   ROSEBERY.
+
+   "Dr ALEXANDER H. JAPP."
+
+This I at once replied to as follows:
+
+   "NATIONAL LIBERAL CLUB,
+   WHITEHALL PLACE, S.W.,
+   19_th_ _December_ 1896.
+
+   "MY LORD,--It is true R. L. Stevenson did not refer to Thoreau in the
+   passage to which you allude, for the good reason that he could not,
+   since he did not know Thoreau till after it was written; but if you
+   will oblige me and be so good as to turn to p. xix. of Preface, _By
+   Way of Criticism_, to _Familiar Studies of Men and Books_ you will
+   read:
+
+   "'Upon me this pure, narrow, sunnily-ascetic Thoreau had exercised a
+   wondrous charm.  _I have scarce written ten sentences since I was
+   introduced to him_, _but his influence might be somewhere detected by
+   a close observer_.'
+
+   "It is very detectable in many passages of nature-description and of
+   reflection.  I write, my Lord, merely that, in case opportunity should
+   arise, you might notice this fact.  I am sure R. L. Stevenson would
+   have liked it recognised.--I remain, my Lord, always yours faithfully,
+   etc.,
+
+   ALEXANDER H. JAPP."
+
+{Manuscript letter by R.L.S.: p262.jpg}
+
+In reply to this Lord Rosebery sent me only the most formal
+acknowledgment, not in the least encouraging me in any way to further aid
+him in the matter with regard to suggestions of any kind; so that I was
+helpless to press on his lordship the need for some corrections on other
+points which I would most willingly have tendered to him had he shown
+himself inclined or ready to receive them.
+
+I might also have referred Lord Rosebery to the article in _The British
+Weekly_ (_1887_), "Books that have Influenced Me," where, after having
+spoken of Shakespeare, the _Vicomte de Bragelonne_, Bunyan, Montaigne,
+Goethe, Martial, Marcus Aurelius's _Meditations_, and Wordsworth, he
+proceeds:
+
+   "I suppose, when I am done, I shall find that I have forgotten much
+   that is influential, as I see already I have forgotten Thoreau."
+
+I need but to add to what has been said already that, had Lord Rosebery
+written and told me the result of his references and encouraged me to
+such an exercise, I should by-and-by have been very pleased to point out
+to him that he blundered, proving himself no master in Burns' literature,
+precisely as Mr Henley blundered about Burns' ancestry, when he gives
+confirmation to the idea that Burns came of a race of peasants on both
+sides, and was himself nothing but a peasant.
+
+When the opportunity came to correct such blunders, corrections which I
+had even implored him to make, Lord Rosebery (who by several London
+papers had been spoken of as "knowing more than all the experts about all
+his themes"), that is, when his volume was being prepared for press, did
+not act on my good advice given him "_free_, _gratis_, _for nothing_";
+no; he contented himself with simply slicing out columns from the
+_Times_, or allowing another man to do so for him, and reprinting them
+_literatim et verbatim_, all imperfect and misleading, as they stood.
+_Scripta manet_ alas! only too truly exemplified to his disadvantage.  But
+with that note of mine in his hand, protesting against an ominous and
+fatal omission as regards the confessed influences that had operated on
+Stevenson, he goes on, or allows Mr Geake to go on, quite as though he
+had verified matters and found that I was wrong as regards the facts on
+which I based my appeal to him for recognition of Thoreau as having
+influenced Stevenson in style.  Had he attended to correcting his serious
+errors about Stevenson, and some at least of those about Burns, thus
+adding, say, a dozen or twenty pages to his book wholly fresh and new and
+accurate, then the _Times_ could not have got, even if it had sought, an
+injunction against his publishers and him; and there would have been no
+necessity that he should pad out other and later speeches by just a
+little whining over what was entirely due to his own disregard of good
+advice, his own neglect--his own fault--a neglect and a fault showing
+determination not to revise where revision in justice to his subject's
+own free and frank acknowledgments made it most essential and necessary.
+
+Mr Justice North gave his decision against Lord Rosebery and his
+publishers, while the Lords of Appeal went in his favour; but the House
+of Lords reaffirmed the decision of Mr Justice North and granted a
+perpetual injunction against this book.  The copyright in his speech is
+Lord Rosebery's, but the copyright in the _Times_' report is the
+_Times_'.  You see one of the ideas underlying the law is that no manner
+of speech is quite perfect as the man speaks it, or is beyond revision,
+improvement, or extension, and, if there is but one _verbatim_ report, as
+was the case of some of these speeches and addresses, then it is
+incumbent on the author, if he wishes to preserve his copyright, to
+revise and correct his speeches and addresses, so as to make them at
+least in details so far differ from the reported form.  This thing ought
+Lord Rosebery to have done, on ethical and literary _grounds_, not to
+speak of legal and self-interested grounds; and I, for one, who from the
+first held exactly the view the House of Lords has affirmed, do confess
+that I have no sympathy for Lord Rosebery, since he had before him the
+suggestion and the materials for as substantial alterations and additions
+from my own hands, with as much more for other portions of his book, had
+he informed me of his appreciation, as would have saved him and his book
+from such a sadly ironical fate as has overtaken him and it.
+
+From the whole business--since "free, gratis, for nothing," I offered him
+as good advice as any lawyer in the three kingdoms could have done for
+large payment, and since he never deemed it worth while, even to tell me
+the results of his reference to _Familiar Studies_, I here and now say
+deliberately that his conduct to me was scarcely so courteous and
+grateful and graceful as it might have been.  How different--very
+different--the way in which the late R. L. Stevenson rewarded me for a
+literary service no whit greater or more essentially valuable to him than
+this service rendered to Lord Rosebery might have been to him.
+
+This chapter would most probably not have been printed, had not Mr Coates
+re-issued the inadequate and most misleading paragraph about Mr Stevenson
+and style in his Lord Rosebery's _Life and Speeches_ exactly as it was
+before, thus perpetuating at once the error and the wrong, in spite of
+all my trouble, warnings, and protests.  It is a tragicomedy, if not a
+farce altogether, considering who are the principal actors in it.  And
+let those who have copies of the queer prohibited book cherish them and
+thank me; for that I do by this give a new interest and value to it as a
+curiosity, law-inhibited, if not as high and conscientious
+literature--which it is not.
+
+I remember very well about the time Lord Rosebery spoke on Burns, and
+Stevenson, and London, that certain London papers spoke of his
+deliverances as indicating more knowledge--fuller and exacter
+knowledge--of all these subjects than the greatest professed experts
+possessed.  That is their extravagant and most reckless way, especially
+if the person spoken about is a "great politician" or a man of rank.  They
+think they are safe with such superlatives applied to a brilliant and
+clever peer (with large estates and many interests), and an ex-Prime
+Minister!  But literature is a republic, and it must here be said, though
+all unwillingly, that Lord Rosebery is but an amateur--a superficial
+though a clever amateur after all, and their extravagances do not change
+the fact.  I declare him an amateur in Burns' literature and study
+because of what I have said elsewhere, and there are many points to add
+to that if need were.  I have proved above from his own words that he was
+crassly and unpardonably ignorant of some of the most important points in
+R. L. Stevenson's development when he delivered that address in Edinburgh
+on Stevenson--a thing very, very pardonable--seeing that he is run after
+to do "speakings" of this sort; but to go on, in face of such warning and
+protest, printing his most misleading errors is not pardonable, and the
+legal recorded result is my justification and his condemnation, the more
+surely that even that would not awaken him so far as to cause him to
+restrain Mr Coates from reproducing in his _Life and Speeches_, just as
+it was originally, that peccant passage.  I am fully ready to prove also
+that, though Chairman of the London County Council for a period, and
+though he made a very clever address at one of Sir W. Besant's lectures,
+there is much yet--very much--he might learn from Sir W. Besant's
+writings on London.  It isn't so easy to outshine all the experts--even
+for a clever peer who has been Prime Minister, though it is very, very
+easy to flatter Lord Rosebery, with a purpose or purposes, as did at
+least once also with rarest tact, at Glasgow, indicating so many other
+things and possibilities, a certain very courtly ex-Moderator of the
+Church of Scotland.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI--MR GOSSE AND MS. OF _TREASURE ISLAND_
+
+
+Mr Edmund Gosse has been so good as to set down, with rather an air of
+too much authority, that both R. L. Stevenson and I deceived ourselves
+completely in the matter of my little share in the _Treasure Island_
+business, and that too much credit was sought by me or given to me, for
+the little service I rendered to R. L. Stevenson, and to the world, say,
+in helping to secure for it an element of pleasure through many
+generations.  I have not _sought_ any recognition from the world in this
+matter, and even the mention of it became so intolerable to me that I
+eschewed all writing about it, in the face of the most stupid and
+misleading statements, till Mr Sidney Colvin wrote and asked me to set
+down my account of the matter in my own words.  This I did, as it would
+have been really rude to refuse a request so graciously made, and the
+reader has it in the _Academy_ of 10th March 1900.  Nevertheless, Mr
+Gosse's statements were revived and quoted, and the thing seemed ever to
+revolve again in a round of controversy.
+
+Now, with regard to the reliability in this matter of Mr Edmund Gosse,
+let me copy here a little note made at request some time ago, dealing
+with two points.  The first is this:
+
+1. _Most assuredly_ I carried away from Braemar in my portmanteau, as R.
+L. Stevenson says in _Idler's_ article and in chapter of _My First Book_
+reprinted in _Edinburgh Edition_, several chapters of _Treasure Island_.
+On that point R. L. Stevenson, myself, and Mr James Henderson, to whom I
+took these, could not all be wrong and co-operating to mislead the
+public.  These chapters, at least vii. or viii., as Mr Henderson
+remembers, would include the _first three_, that is, _finally revised
+versions for press_.  Mr Gosse could not then _have heard R. L. Stevenson
+read from these final versions but from first draughts_ ONLY, and I am
+positively certain that with some of the later chapters R. L. Stevenson
+wrote them off-hand, and with great ease, and did not revise them to the
+extent of at all needing to re-write them, as I remember he was proud to
+tell me, being then fully in the vein, as he put it, and pleased to
+credit me with a share in this good result, and saying "my enthusiasm
+over it had set him up steep."  There was then, in my idea, a necessity
+that Stevenson should fill up a gap by verbal summary to Mr Gosse (which
+Mr Gosse has forgotten), bringing the incident up to a further point than
+Mr Gosse now thinks.  I am certain of my facts under this head; and as Mr
+Gosse clearly fancies he heard R. L. Stevenson read all from final
+versions and is mistaken--_completely_ mistaken there--he may be just as
+wrong and the victim of error or bad memory elsewhere after the lapse of
+more than twenty years.
+
+2. I gave the pencilled outline of incident and plot to Mr Henderson--a
+fact he distinctly remembers.  This fact completely meets and disposes of
+Mr Robert Leighton's quite imaginative _Billy Bo'sun_ notion, and is
+absolute as to R. L. Stevenson before he left Braemar on the 21st
+September 1881, or even before I left it on 26th August 1881, having
+clear in his mind the whole scheme of the work, though we know very well
+that the absolute re-writing out finally for press of the concluding part
+of the book was done at Davos.  Mr Henderson has always made it the
+strictest rule in his editorship that the complete outline of the plot
+and incident of the latter part of a story must be supplied to him, if
+the whole story is not submitted to him in MS.; and the agreement, if I
+am not much mistaken, was entered into days before R. L. Stevenson left
+Braemar, and when he came up to London some short time after to go to
+Weybridge, the only arrangement then needed to be made was about the
+forwarding of proofs to him.
+
+The publication of _Treasure Island_ in _Young Folks_ began on the 1st
+October 1881, No. 565 and ran on in the following order:
+
+   _October_ 1, 1881.
+   THE PROLOGUE
+
+   No. 565.
+   I. The Old Sea Dog at the Admiral Benbow.
+   II. Black Dog Appears and Disappears.
+
+   No. 566.
+   Dated _October_ 8, 1881.
+   III. The Black Spot.
+
+   No. 567.
+   Dated _October_ 15, 1881.
+   IV. The Sea Chart.
+   V. The Last of the Blind Man.
+   VI. The Captain's Papers.
+
+   No. 568.
+   Dated _October_ 22, 1881.
+   THE STORY
+   I. I go to Bristol.
+   II. The Sea-Cook.
+   Ill.  Powder and Arms.
+
+Now, as the numbers of _Young Folks_ were printed about a fortnight in
+advance of the date they bear under the title, it is clear that not only
+must the contract have been executed days before the middle of September,
+but that a large proportion of the _copy_ must have been in Mr
+Henderson's hands at that date too, as he must have been entirely
+satisfied that the story would go on and be finished in a definite time.
+On no other terms would he have begun the publication of it.  He was not
+in the least likely to have accepted a story from a man who, though known
+as an essayist, had not yet published anything in the way of a long
+story, on the ground merely of three chapters of prologue.  Mr Gosse left
+Braemar on 5th September, when he says nine chapters were written, and Mr
+Henderson had offered terms for the story before the last of these could
+have reached him.  That is on seeing, say six chapters of prologue.  But
+when Mr Gosse speaks about three chapters only written, does he mean
+three of the prologue or three of the story, in addition to prologue, or
+what does he mean?  The facts are clear.  I took away in my portmanteau a
+large portion of the MS., together with a very full outline of the rest
+of the story, so that Mr Stevenson was, despite Mr Gosse's cavillings,
+_substantially_ right when he wrote in _My First Book_ in the _Idler_,
+etc., that "when he (Dr Japp) left us he carried away the manuscript in
+his portmanteau."  There was nothing of the nature of an abandonment of
+the story at any point, nor any difficulty whatever arose in this respect
+in regard to it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII--STEVENSON PORTRAITS
+
+
+Of the portraits of Stevenson a word or two may be said.  There is a very
+good early photograph of him, taken not very long before the date of my
+visit to him at Braemar in 1881, and is an admirable
+likeness--characteristic not only in expression, but in pose and
+attitude, for it fixes him in a favourite position of his; and is, at the
+same time, very easy and natural.  The velvet jacket, as I have remarked,
+was then his habitual wear, and the thin fingers holding the constant
+cigarette an inseparable associate and accompaniment.
+
+He acknowledged himself that he was a difficult subject to paint--not at
+all a good sitter--impatient and apt to rebel at posing and time spent in
+arrangement of details--a fact he has himself, as we shall see, set on
+record in his funny verses to Count Nerli, who painted as successful a
+portrait as any.  The little miniature, full-length, by Mr J. S. Sarjent,
+A.R.A., which was painted at Bournemouth in 1885, is confessedly a mere
+sketch and much of a caricature: it is in America.  Sir W. B. Richmond
+has an unfinished portrait, painted in 1885 or 1886--it has never passed
+out of the hands of the artist,--a photogravure from it is our
+frontispiece.
+
+There is a medallion done by St Gauden's, representing Stevenson in bed
+propped up by pillows.  It is thought to be a pretty good likeness, and
+it is now in Mr Sidney Colvin's possession.  Others, drawings, etc., are
+not of much account.
+
+And now we come to the Nerli portrait, of which so much has been written.
+Stevenson himself regarded it as the best portrait of him ever painted,
+and certainly it also is characteristic and effective, and though not
+what may be called a pleasant likeness, is probably a good representation
+of him in the later years of his life.  Count Nerli actually undertook a
+voyage to Samoa in 1892, mainly with the idea of painting this portrait.
+He and Stevenson became great friends, as Stevenson naively tells in the
+verses we have already referred to, but even this did not quite overcome
+Stevenson's restlessness.  He avenged himself by composing these verses
+as he sat:
+
+   Did ever mortal man hear tell o' sic a ticklin' ferlie
+   As the comin' on to Apia here o' the painter Mr Nerli?
+   He cam'; and, O, for o' human freen's o' a' he was the pearlie--
+   The pearl o' a' the painter folk was surely Mr Nerli.
+   He took a thraw to paint mysel'; he painted late and early;
+   O wow! the many a yawn I've yawned i' the beard o' Mr Nerli.
+   Whiles I wad sleep and whiles wad wake, an' whiles was mair than
+   surly;
+   I wondered sair as I sat there fornent the eyes o' Nerli.
+   O will he paint me the way I want, as bonnie as a girlie?
+   O will he paint me an ugly tyke?--and be d-d to Mr Nerli.
+   But still an' on whichever it be, he is a canty kerlie,
+   The Lord protect the back an' neck o' honest Mr Nerli.
+
+Mr Hammerton gives this account of the Nerli portrait:
+
+   "The history of the Nerli portrait is peculiar.  After being exhibited
+   for some time in New Zealand it was bought, in the course of this
+   year, by a lady who was travelling there, for a hundred guineas.  She
+   then offered it for that sum to the Scottish National Portrait
+   Gallery; but the Trustees of the Board of Manufactures--that oddly
+   named body to which is entrusted the fostering care of Art in
+   Scotland, and, in consequence, the superintendence of the National
+   Portrait Gallery--did not see their way to accept the offer.  Some
+   surprise has been expressed at the action of the Trustees in thus
+   declining to avail themselves of the opportunity of obtaining the
+   portrait of one of the most distinguished Scotsmen of recent times.  It
+   can hardly have been for want of money, for though the funds at their
+   disposal for the purchase of ordinary works of art are but limited, no
+   longer ago than last year they were the recipients of a very handsome
+   legacy from the late Mr J. M. Gray, the accomplished and much lamented
+   Curator of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery--a legacy left them
+   for the express purpose of acquiring portraits of distinguished
+   Scotsmen, and the income of which was amply sufficient to have enabled
+   them to purchase this portrait.  One is therefore almost shut up to
+   the conclusion that the Trustees were influenced in their decision by
+   one of the two following reasons:
+
+   "1. That they did not consider Stevenson worthy of a place in the
+   gallery.  This is a position so incomprehensible and so utterly
+   opposed to public sentiment that one can hardly credit it having been
+   the cause of this refusal.  Whatever may be the place which Stevenson
+   may ultimately take as an author, and however opinions may differ as
+   to the merits of his work, no one can deny that he was one of the most
+   popular writers of his day, and that as a mere master of style, if for
+   nothing else, his works will be read so long as there are students of
+   English Literature.  Surely the portrait of one for whom such a claim
+   may legitimately be made cannot be considered altogether unworthy of a
+   place in the National Collection, as one of Scotland's most
+   distinguished sons.
+
+   "2. The only other reason which can be suggested as having weighed
+   with the Trustees in their decision is one which in some cases might
+   be held to be worthy of consideration.  It is conceivable that in the
+   case of some men the Trustees might be of opinion that there was
+   plenty of time to consider the matter, and that in the meantime there
+   was always the chance of some generous donor presenting them with a
+   portrait.  But, as has been shown above, the portraits of Stevenson
+   are practically confined to two: one of these is in America, and there
+   is not the least chance of its ever coming here; and the other they
+   have refused.  And, as it is understood that the Trustees have a rule
+   that they do not accept any portrait which has not been painted from
+   the life, they preclude themselves from acquiring a copy of any
+   existing picture or even a portrait done from memory.
+
+   "It is rumoured that the Nerli portrait may ultimately find a resting-
+   place in the National Collection of Portraits in London.  If this
+   should prove to be the case, what a commentary on the old saying: 'A
+   prophet is not without honour save in his own country.'"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII--LAPSES AND ERRORS IN CRITICISM
+
+
+Nothing could perhaps be more wearisome than to travel o'er the wide
+sandy area of Stevenson criticism and commentary, and expose the many and
+sad and grotesque errors that meet one there.  Mr Baildon's slip is
+innocent, compared with many when he says (p. 106) _Treasure Island_
+appeared in _Young Folks_ as _The Sea-Cook_.  It did nothing of the kind;
+it is on plain record in print, even in the pages of the _Edinburgh
+Edition_, that Mr James Henderson would not have the title _The
+Sea-Cook_, as he did not like it, and insisted on its being _Treasure
+Island_.  To him, therefore, the vastly better title is due.  Mr Henley
+was in doubt if Mr Henderson was still alive when he wrote the brilliant
+and elevated article on "Some Novels" in the _North American_, and as a
+certain dark bird killed Cock Robin, so he killed off Dr Japp, and not to
+be outdone, got in an ideal "Colonel" _Jack_; so Mr Baildon there follows
+Henley, unaware that Mr Henderson did not like _The Sea-Cook_, and was
+still alive, and that a certain Jack in the fatal _North American_ has
+Japp's credit.
+
+Mr Baildon's words are:
+
+   "This was the famous book of adventure, _Treasure Island_, appearing
+   first as _The Sea-Cook_ in a boy's paper, where it made no great stir.
+   But, on its publication in volume form, with the vastly better title,
+   the book at once 'boomed,' as the phrase goes, to an extent then, in
+   1882, almost unprecedented.  The secret of its immense success may
+   almost be expressed in a phrase by saying that it is a book like
+   _Gulliver's Travels_, _The Pilgrim's Progress_, and _Robinson Crusoe_
+   itself for all ages--boys, men, and women."
+
+Which just shows how far lapse as to a fact may lead to critical
+misreadings also.
+
+Mr Hammerton sometimes lets good folks say in his pages, without
+correction, what is certainly not correct.  Thus at one place we are told
+that Stevenson was only known as Louis in print, whereas that was the
+only name by which he was known in his own family.  Then Mr Gosse, at p.
+34, is allowed to write:
+
+   "Professor Blackie was among them on the steamer from the Hebrides, a
+   famous figure that calls for no description, and a voluble shaggy man,
+   clad in homespun, with spectacles forward upon his nose, who it was
+   whispered to us, was Mr Sam Bough, the Scottish Academician, _a water-
+   colour painter of some repute_, who was to die in 1878."
+
+Mr Sam Bough _was_ "a water-colour painter of some repute," but a painter
+in oils of yet greater repute--a man of rare strength, resource, and
+facility--never, perhaps, wholly escaping from some traces of his early
+experiences in scene-painting, but a true genius in his art.  Ah, well I
+remember him, though an older man, yet youthful in the band of young
+Scotch artists among whom as a youngster I was privileged to move in
+Edinburgh--Pettie, Chalmers, M'Whirter, Peter Graham, MacTaggart,
+MacDonald, John Burr, and Bough.  Bough could be voluble on art; and many
+a talk I had with him as with the others named, especially with John
+Burr.  Bough and he both could talk as well as paint, and talk right
+well.  Bough had a slight cast in the eye; when he got a _wee_ excited on
+his subject he would come close to you with head shaking, and spectacles
+displaced, and forelock wagging, and the cast would seem to die away.  Was
+this a fact, or was it an illusion on my part?  I have often asked myself
+that question, and now I ask it of others.  Can any of my good friends in
+Edinburgh say; can Mr Caw help me here, either to confirm or to correct
+me?  I venture to insert here an anecdote, with which my friend of old
+days, Mr Wm. MacTaggart, R.S.A., in a letter kindly favours me:
+
+   "Sam Bough was a very sociable man; and, when on a sketching tour,
+   liked to have a young artist or two with him.  Jack Nisbett played the
+   violin, and Sam the 'cello, etc.  Jack was fond of telling that Sam
+   used to let them all choose the best views, and then he would take
+   what was left; and Jack, with mild astonishment, would say, that 'it
+   generally turned out to be the best--on the canvas!'"
+
+In Mr Hammerton's copy of the verses in reply to Mr Crockett's dedication
+of _The Stickit Minister_ to Stevenson, in which occurred the fine phrase
+"The grey Galloway lands, where about the graves of the martyrs the
+whaups are crying, his heart remembers how":
+
+   "Blows the wind to-day and the sun and the rain are flying:
+      Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now,
+   Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying,
+      My heart remembers how.
+
+   "Grey recumbent tombs of the dead in desert places,
+      Standing stones on the vacant wine-red moor,
+   Hills of sheep, and the _homes_ of the silent vanished races,
+      And winds austere and pure.
+
+   "Be it granted me to behold you again in dying,
+      Hills of home! and to hear again the call--
+   Hear about the graves of the martyrs the pee-weet crying,
+      And hear no more at all."
+
+Mr Hammerton prints _howes_ instead of _homes_, which I have italicised
+above.  And I may note, though it does not affect the poetry, if it does
+a little affect the natural history, that the _pee-weets_ and the whaups
+are not the same--the one is the curlew, and the other is the lapwing--the
+one most frequenting wild, heathery or peaty moorland, and the other
+pasture or even ploughed land--so that it is a great pity for unity and
+simplicity alike that Stevenson did not repeat the "whaup," but wrote
+rather as though pee-weet or pee-weets were the same as whaups--the
+common call of the one is _Ker-lee_, _ker-lee_, and of the other _pee-
+weet_, _pee-weet_, hence its common name.
+
+It is a pity, too, that Mr Hammerton has no records of some portions of
+the life at Davos Platz.  Not only was Stevenson ill there in April 1892,
+but his wife collapsed, and the tender concern for her made havoc with
+some details of his literary work.  It is good to know this.  Such errata
+or omissions throw a finer light on his character than controlling
+perfection would do.  Ah, I remember how my old friend W. B. Rands
+("Matthew Browne" and "Henry Holbeach") was wont to declare that were men
+perfect they would be isolated, if not idiotic, that we are united to
+each other by our defects--that even physical beauty would be dead like
+later Greek statues, were these not departures from the perfect lines.
+The letter given by me at p. 28 transfigures in its light, some of his
+work at that time.
+
+And then what an opportunity, we deeply regret to say, Mr Hammerton
+wholly missed, when he passed over without due explanation or commentary
+that most significant pamphlet--the _Address to the Scottish Clergy_.  If
+Mr Hammerton had but duly and closely studied that and its bearings and
+suggestions in many directions, then he would have written such a chapter
+for true enlightenment and for interest as exactly his book--attractive
+though it is in much--yet specially lacks.  It is to be hoped that Mr
+Sidney Colvin will not once more miss the chance which is thus still left
+open to him to perfect his _Life of Stevenson_, and make it more
+interpretive than anything yet published.  If he does this, then, a
+dreadful _lacuna_ in the _Edinburgh Edition_ will also be supplied.
+
+Carefully reading over again Mr Arthur Symons' _Studies in Two
+Literatures_--published some years ago--I have come across instances of
+apparent contradiction which, so far as I can see, he does not critically
+altogether reconcile, despite his ingenuity and great charm of style.  One
+relates to Thoreau, who, while still "sturdy" as Emerson says, "and like
+an elm tree," as his sister Sophia says, showed exactly the same love of
+nature and power of interpreting her as he did after in his later
+comparatively short period of "invalidity," while Mr Symons says his view
+of Nature absolutely was that of the invalid, classing him unqualifiedly
+with Jefferies and Stevenson, as invalid.  Thoreau's mark even in the
+short later period of "invalidity" was complete and robust independence
+and triumph over it--a thing which I have no doubt wholly captivated
+Stevenson, as scarce anything else would have done, as a victory in the
+exact _role_ he himself was most ambitious to fill.  For did not he too
+wrestle well with the "wolverine" he carried on his back--in this like
+Addington Symonds and Alexander Pope?  Surely I cannot be wrong here to
+reinforce my statement by a passage from a letter written by Sophia
+Thoreau to her good friend Daniel Ricketson, after her brother's death,
+the more that R. L. Stevenson would have greatly exulted too in its
+cheery and invincible stoicism:
+
+   "Profound joy mingles with my grief.  I feel as if something very
+   beautiful had happened--not death; although Henry is with us no
+   longer, yet the memory of his sweet and virtuous soul must ever cheer
+   and comfort me.  My heart is filled with praise to God for the gift of
+   such a brother, and may I never distrust the love and wisdom of Him
+   who made him and who has now called him to labour in more glorious
+   fields than earth affords.  You ask for some particulars relating to
+   Henry's illness.  I feel like saying that Henry was never affected,
+   never reached by it.  I never before saw such a manifestation of the
+   power of spirit over matter.  Very often I heard him tell his visitors
+   that he enjoyed existence as well as ever.  The thought of death, he
+   said, did not trouble him.  His thoughts had entertained him all his
+   life and did still. . . . He considered occupation as necessary for
+   the sick as for those in health, and accomplished a vast amount of
+   labour in those last few months."
+
+A rare "invalidity" this--a little confusing easy classifications.  I
+think Stevenson would have felt and said that brother and sister were
+well worthy of each other; and that the sister was almost as grand and
+cheery a stoic, with no literary profession of it, as was the brother.
+
+The other thing relates to Stevenson's _human soul_.  I find Mr Symons
+says, at p. 243, that Stevenson "had something a trifle elfish and
+uncanny about him, as of a bewitched being who was not actually human--had
+not actually a human soul"--in which there may be a glimmer of truth
+viewed from his revelation of artistic curiosities in some aspects, but
+is hardly true of him otherwise; and this Mr Symons himself seems to have
+felt, when, at p. 246, he writes: "He is one of those writers who speak
+_to us on easy terms_, with whom we _may exchange affections_."  How
+"affections" could be exchanged on easy terms between the normal human
+being and an elfish creature actually _without a human soul_ (seeing that
+affections are, as Mr Matthew Arnold might have said, at least, three-
+fourths of soul) is more, I confess, than I can quite see at present; but
+in this rather _maladroit_ contradiction Mr Symons does point at one
+phase of the problem of Stevenson--this, namely that to all the ordinary
+happy or pleasure-endings he opposes, as it were of set purpose, gloom,
+as though to certain things he was quite indifferent, and though, as we
+have seen, his actual life and practice were quite opposed to this.
+
+I am sorry I _cannot_ find the link in Mr Symons' essay, which would
+quite make these two statements consistently coincide critically.  As an
+enthusiastic, though I hope still a discriminating, Stevensonian, I do
+wish Mr Symons would help us to it somehow hereafter.  It would be well
+worth his doing, in my opinion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV--LETTERS AND POEMS IN TESTIMONY
+
+
+Among many letters received by me in acknowledgment of, or in commentary
+on, my little tributes to R. L. Stevenson, in various journals and
+magazines, I find the following, which I give here for reasons purely
+personal, and because my readers may with me, join in admiration of the
+fancy, grace and beauty of the poems.  I must preface the first poem by a
+letter, which explains the genesis of the poem, and relates a striking
+and very touching incident:
+
+   "37 ST DONATT'S ROAD,
+   LEWISHAM HIGH ROAD, S.E.,
+   1_st_ _March_ 1895.
+
+   "DEAR SIR,--As you have written so much about your friend, the late
+   Robert Louis Stevenson, and quoted many tributes to his genius from
+   contemporary writers, I take the liberty of sending you herewith some
+   verses of mine which appeared in _The Weekly Sun_ of November last.  I
+   sent a copy of these verses to Samoa, but unfortunately the great
+   novelist died before they reached it.  I have, however, this week,
+   received a little note from Mrs Strong, which runs as follows:
+
+   "'Your poem of "Greeting" came too late.  I can only thank you by
+   sending a little moss that I plucked from a tree overhanging his grave
+   on Vaea Mountain.'
+
+   "I trust you will appreciate my motive in sending you the poem.  I do
+   not wish to obtrude my claims as a verse-writer upon your notice, but
+   I thought the incident I have recited would be interesting to one who
+   is so devoted a collector of Stevensoniana.--Respectfully yours,
+
+   F. J. COX."
+
+
+
+GREETING
+
+
+(TO ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, IN SAMOA)
+
+We, pent in cities, prisoned in the mart,
+Can know you only as a man apart,
+But ever-present through your matchless art.
+
+You have exchanged the old, familiar ways
+For isles, where, through the range of splendid days,
+Her treasure Nature lavishly displays.
+
+There, by the gracious sweep of ampler seas,
+That swell responsive to the odorous breeze.
+You have the wine of Life, and we the lees!
+
+You mark, perchance, within your island bowers,
+The slow departure of the languorous hours,
+And breathe the sweetness of the strange wild-flowers.
+
+And everything your soul and sense delights--
+But in the solemn wonder of your nights,
+When Peace her message on the landscape writes;
+
+When Ocean scarcely flecks her marge with foam--
+Your thoughts must sometimes from your island roam,
+To centre on the sober face of Home.
+
+Though many a league of water rolls between
+The simple beauty of an English scene,
+From all these wilder charms your love may wean.
+
+Some kindly sprite may bring you as a boon
+Sweets from the rose that crowns imperial June,
+Or reminiscence of the throstle's tune;
+
+Yea, gladly grant you, with a generous hand,
+Far glimpses of the winding, wind-swept strand,
+The glens and mountains of your native land,
+
+Until you hear the pipes upon the breeze--
+But wake unto the wild realities
+The tangled forests and the boundless seas!
+
+For lo! the moonless night has passed away,
+A sudden dawn dispels the shadows grey,
+The glad sea moves and hails the quickening day.
+
+New life within the arbours of your fief
+Awakes the blossom, quivers in the leaf,
+And splendour flames upon the coral reef.
+
+If such a prospect stimulate your art,
+More than our meadows where the shadows dart,
+More than the life which throbs in London's heart,
+
+Then stay, encircled by your Southern bowers,
+And weave, amid the incense of the flowers,
+The skein of fair romance--the gain is ours!
+
+F. J. COX.
+
+_Weekly Sun_, 11_th_ November 1904.
+
+
+
+R. L. S., IN MEMORIAM.
+
+
+An elfin wight as e'er from faeryland
+   Came to us straight with favour in his eyes,
+   Of wondrous seed that led him to the prize
+Of fancy, with the magic rod in hand.
+Ah, there in faeryland we saw him stand,
+   As for a while he walked with smiles and sighs,
+   Amongst us, finding still the gem that buys
+Delight and joy at genius's command.
+
+And now thy place is empty: fare thee well;
+   Thou livest still in hearts that owe thee more
+   Than gold can reckon; for thy richer store
+Is of the good that with us aye most dwell.
+   Farewell; sleep sound on Vaea's windy shrine,
+   While round the songsters join their song to thine.
+
+A. C. R.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX
+
+
+The following appeared some time ago in one of the London evening papers,
+and I make bold, because of its truth and vigour, to insert it here:
+
+
+
+THE LAND OF STEVENSON,
+_ON AN AFTERNOON'S WALK_
+
+
+Will there be a "Land of Stevenson," as there is already a "Land of
+Burns," or a "Land of Scott," known to the tourist, bescribbled by the
+guide-book maker?  This the future must tell.  Yet will it be easy to
+mark out the bounds of "Robert Louis Stevenson's Country"; and, taking
+his native and well-loved city for a starting-point, a stout walker may
+visit all its principal sites in an afternoon.  The house where he was
+born is within a bowshot of the Water of Leith; some five miles to the
+south are Caerketton and Allermuir, and other crests of the Pentlands,
+and below them Swanston Farm, where year after year, in his father's
+time, he spent the summer days basking on the hill slopes; two or three
+miles to the westward of Swanston is Colinton, where his mother's father,
+Dr Balfour, was minister; and here again you are back to the Water of
+Leith, which you can follow down to the New Town.  In this triangular
+space Stevenson's memories and affections were firmly rooted; the fibres
+could not be withdrawn from the soil, and "the voice of the blood" and
+the longing for this little piece of earth make themselves plaintively
+heard in his last notes.  By Lothian Road, after which Stevenson quaintly
+thought of naming the new edition of his works, and past Boroughmuirhead
+and the "Bore Stane," where James FitzJames set up his standard before
+Flodden, wends your southward way to the hills.  The builder of suburban
+villas has pushed his handiwork far into the fields since Stevenson was
+wont to tramp between the city and the Pentlands; and you may look in
+vain for the flat stone whereon, as the marvelling child was told, there
+once rose a "crow-haunted gibbet."  Three-quarters of an hour of easy
+walking, after you have cleared the last of the houses will bring you to
+Swanston; and half an hour more will take the stiff climber, a little
+breathless, to
+
+
+THE TOP OF CAERKETTON CRAGS.
+
+
+You may follow the high road--indeed there is a choice of two, drawn at
+different levels--athwart the western skirts of the Braid Hills, now
+tenanted, crown and sides of them, by golf; then to the crossroads of
+Fairmilehead, whence the road dips down, to rise again and circumvent the
+most easterly wing of the Pentlands.  You would like to pursue this
+route, were it only to look down on Bow Bridge and recall how the last-
+century gauger used to put together his flute and play "Over the hills
+and far away" as a signal to his friend in the distillery below, now
+converted into a dairy farm, to stow away his barrels.  Better it is,
+however, to climb the stile just past the poor-house gate, and follow the
+footpath along the smoothly scooped banks of the Braid Burn to
+"Cockmylane" and to Comiston.  The wind has been busy all the morning
+spreading the snow over a glittering world.  The drifts are piled
+shoulder-high in the lane as it approaches Comiston, and each old tree
+grouped around the historic mansion is outlined in snow so virgin pure
+that were the Ghost--"a lady in white, with the most beautiful clear
+shoes on her feet"--to step out through the back gate, she would be
+invisible, unless, indeed, she were between you and the ivy-draped
+dovecot wall.  Near by, at the corner of the Dreghorn Woods, is the
+Hunters' Tryst, on the roof of which, when it was still a wayside inn,
+the Devil was wont to dance on windy nights.  In the field through which
+you trudge knee-deep in drift rises the "Kay Stane," looking to-day like
+a tall monolith of whitest marble.  Stevenson was mistaken when he said
+that it was from its top a neighbouring laird, on pain of losing his
+lands, had to "wind a blast of bugle horn" each time the King
+
+
+VISITED HIS FOREST OF PENTLAND.
+
+
+That honour belongs to another on the adjacent farm of Buckstane.  The
+ancient monument carries you further back, and there are Celtic
+authorities that translate its name the "Stone of Victory."  The
+"Pechtland Hills"--their elder name--were once a refuge for the Picts;
+and Caerketton--probably Caer-etin, the giant's strong-hold--is one of
+them.  Darkly its cliffs frown down upon you, while all else is flashing
+white in the winter sunlight.  For once, in this last buttress thrown out
+into the plain of Lothian towards the royal city, the outer folds of the
+Pentlands loses its boldly-rounded curves, and drops an almost sheer
+descent of black rock to the little glen below.  In a wrinkle of the
+foothills Swanston farm and hamlet are snugly tucked away.  The spirit
+that breathes about it in summer time is gently pastoral.  It is
+sheltered from the rougher blasts; it is set about with trees and green
+hills.  It was with this aspect of the place that Stevenson, coming
+hither on holiday, was best acquainted.  The village green, whereon the
+windows of the neat white cottages turn a kindly gaze under low brows of
+thatch, is then a perfect place in which to rest, and, watching the smoke
+rising and listening to "the leaves ruffling in the breeze," to muse on
+men and things; especially on Sabbath mornings, when the ploughman or
+shepherd, "perplext wi' leisure," it is time to set forth on the three-
+mile walk along the hill-skirts to Colinton kirk.  But Swanston in winter
+time must also
+
+
+HAVE BEEN FAMILIAR TO STEVENSON.
+
+
+Snow-wreathed Pentlands, the ribbed and furrowed front of Caerketton, the
+low sun striking athwart the sloping fields of white, the shadows
+creeping out from the hills, and the frosty yellow fog drawing in from
+the Firth--must often have flashed back on the thoughts of the exile of
+Samoa.  Against this wintry background the white farmhouse, old and crow-
+stepped, looks dingy enough; the garden is heaped with the fantastic
+treasures of the snow; and when you toil heavily up the waterside to the
+clump of pines and beeches you find yourself in a fairy forest.  One need
+not search to-day for the pool where the lynx-eyed John Todd, "the oldest
+herd on the Pentlands," watched from behind the low scrag of wood the
+stranger collie come furtively to wash away the tell-tale stains of
+lamb's blood.  The effacing hand of the snow has smothered it over.
+Higher you mount, mid leg-deep in drift, up the steep and slippery hill-
+face, to the summit.  Edinburgh has been creeping nearer since
+Stevenson's musing fancy began to draw on the memories of the climbs up
+"steep Caerketton."  But this light gives it a mystic distance; and it is
+all glitter and shadow.  Arthur Seat is like some great sea monster
+stranded near a city of dreams; from the fog-swathed Firth gleams the
+white walls of Inchkeith lighthouse, a mark never missed by Stevenson's
+father's son; above Fife rise the twin breasts of the Lomonds.  Or turn
+round and look across the Esk valley to the Moorfoots; or more westerly,
+where the back range of the Pentlands--Caernethy, the Scald, and the
+knife-edged Kips--draw a sharp silhouette of Arctic peaks against the
+sky.  In the cloven hollow between is Glencarse Loch, an ancient chapel
+and burying ground hidden under its waters; on the slope above it, not a
+couple miles away, is Rullion Green, where, as Stevenson told in _The
+Pentland Rising_ (his first printed work)
+
+
+THE WESTLAND WHIGS WERE SCATTERED
+
+
+as chaff on the hills.  Were "topmost Allermuir," that rises close beside
+you, removed from his place, we might see the gap in the range through
+which Tom Dalyell and his troopers spurred from Currie to the fray.  The
+air on these heights is invigorating as wine; but it is also keen as a
+razor.  Without delaying long yon plunge down to the "Windy Door Nick";
+follow the "nameless trickle that springs from the green bosom of
+Allermuir," past the rock and pool, where, on summer evenings, the poet
+"loved to sit and make bad verses"; and cross Halkerside and the
+Shearers' Knowe, those "adjacent cantons on a single shoulder of a hill,"
+sometimes floundering to the neck in the loose snow of a drain, sometimes
+scaring the sheep huddling in the wreaths, or putting up a covey of
+moorfowl that circle back without a cry to cover in the ling.  In an hour
+you are at Colinton, whose dell has on one side the manse garden, where a
+bright-eyed boy, who was to become famous, spent so much of his time when
+he came thither on visits to his stern Presbyterian grandfather; on the
+other the old churchyard.  The snow has drawn its cloak of ermine over
+the sleepers, it has run its fingers over the worn lettering; and records
+almost effaced start out from the stone.  In vain these "voices of
+generations dead" summon their wandering child, though you might deem
+that his spirit would rest more quietly where the cold breeze from
+Pentland shakes the ghostly trees in Colinton Dell than "under the
+flailing fans and shadows of the palm."
+
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+
+{1}  Professor Charles Warren Stoddard, Professor of English Literature
+at the Catholic University of Washington, in _Kate Field's Washington_.
+
+{2}  In his portrait-sketch of his father, Stevenson speaks of him as a
+"man of somewhat antique strain, and with a blended sternness and
+softness that was wholly Scottish, and at first sight somewhat
+bewildering," as melancholy, and with a keen sense of his unworthiness,
+yet humorous in company; shrewd and childish; a capital adviser.
+
+{3}  _Inferno_, Canto XV.
+
+{4}  Alas, I never was told that remark--when I saw my friend afterwards
+there was always too much to talk of else, and I forgot to ask.
+
+{5}  Quoted by Hammerton, pp. 2 and 3.
+
+{6}  Tusitala, as the reader must know, is the Samoan for Teller of
+Tales.
+
+{7}  _Wisdom of Goethe_, p. 38.
+
+{8}  _The Foreigner at Home_, in _Memories and Portraits_.
+
+{9}  A great deal has been made of the "John Bull element" in De Quincey
+since his _Memoir_ was written by me (see _Masson's Condensation_, p.
+95); so now perhaps a little more may be made of the rather conceited
+Calvinistic Scot element in R. L. Stevenson!
+
+{10}  It was Mr George Moore who said this.
+
+{11}  _Fortnightly Review_, October, 1903.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON***
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