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 )BERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
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 TO 
 WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY 
 
 
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 'And whensoever thou it uppe dost take. 
 Doe pluck it softlie, for that Shepheard's sake." 
 
 MM66r? 
 
^ A VALEDICTION ^ 
 
 AYS are drooping, thought is dumb. 
 Crept into a cave; 
 Winter terrors thickly come 
 On the haunted wave: 
 Light and delight have left 
 What in their stead. 
 Since the nations kneel- about the bravely fallen head? 
 
 Black the deadly clouds o'errush 
 All our heaven in him. 
 Powder in many a boreal flush. 
 Play of starry w^liim. 
 Ere the king reed is cut. 
 Ere the full strain, 
 Lo, the fickle faun is gone; the woods are bare again. 
 
 Who her truant to the North 
 Chiding, can restore ? 
 Which of cities, leaning forth. 
 Touch him as before ? 
 Where serried Cant efFrays 
 Art, as of old. 
 Nevermore aloft that loved oriflamme of gold. 
 
 Would that he might yet delay 
 While the onset lowers. 
 Would he had not borne away 
 Ardor his and ours! 
 O song upon the march 
 Elsewhither blown! 
 The battle-dread is on us now, riding afield alone. 
 
Though in sorrow and unrest, 
 Scotland searching free 
 Find no steward of the Best 
 Bountiful as he. 
 Nor arms of Scottish dead 
 Fold him, exiled. 
 With the wilder, gentler, he so gentle and so wild; 
 
 And asunder from his own 
 Though Samoa keep 
 Him uplifted to her throne 
 Of pellucid sleep. 
 Winds that across the world 
 Ride the sea-swell, 
 Sign him with the tears of home, the chrism of farewell. 
 
 Was it menace from the dark. 
 Was it body's fret. 
 Early taught a patient barque 
 Cruises sadder yet ? 
 Or but some primal urge 
 Greatly obeyed. 
 Drew to the unfriended hearts the heart of mercy made? 
 
 Where from water's blue outpost 
 Lonely Beauty calls. 
 Calls, and down the glowing coast 
 Felt denial falls; 
 Where tern above the cloud 
 Trooping, have heard 
 From the Prince of Welcomes by, no glad saluting word; 
 
 Where the slanted glens unbar 
 
 Boldly to the gale. 
 
 And aromas, loosed afar. 
 
 Kiss the trader's sail; 
 
 Where over lava-fire 
 
 Dances the vine. 
 For a symbol perfected, thy sepulchre and shrine ! 
 6 
 
Memory like a rainbow stair 
 Painted on the morn. 
 Dearest name that on a prayer 
 Christianly is borne. 
 Soon to romance exhaled. 
 Linger and live: 
 Meed no purer unto man the childlike men can give. 
 
 Still the islands good to seek 
 Rule in wonted mode; 
 Vaea's bright surf-belted peak 
 Still be thine abode! 
 Grief of her loyal race 
 Time shall retrieve. 
 And all in airy legendry thy shining spirit weave. 
 
 To the bathers' wonder, oft 
 As the night is nigh. 
 And to babes beneath the soft 
 Wings of lullaby, 
 (While we of dull unfaith. 
 Thrall to our sighs. 
 Dual dream to quicken thee and us may not devise). 
 
 There on summer's holy hills 
 In illumined calms. 
 Smile of Tusitala thrills 
 Thro* a thousand palms; 
 There in a rapture breaks 
 Dawn on the seas. 
 When Tusitala from his shoon unbinds the Pleiades. 
 
 A STUDY 
 
 HEN one who has lived among us goes voyaging, leav- 
 ing us to the impoverished solitude of a darker night, 
 a cloudier day, we can but set in order the poor lend- 
 ings he has cast aside. He may have gone to sail a 
 wider sea, with promise of return; and then we solace 
 the failing heart with hope. Or, as it happens hourly on this in- 
 secure island whence many are rescued, in strange haste, by ships 
 
that touch before we hail them, and are gone, he may have been 
 snatched forever from the circled rock where he had made what 
 shift he might to build himself a house, and stint his hunger on the 
 wilding root. Then it is that we fold the poor husks of his 
 habiting with solemn care, and a yearning sense of love unspent. 
 This was his book, and this the flower he tended; here stays his 
 glove, still rounded to the wrist and palm. Strange it should 
 yield the grasp no warming thrill! Poor trifles these, until he 
 made them into monuments of grief; small, sacred relics, to be 
 touched only by his dearest, and held for them henceforward in 
 some casket, transfigured by their presence to a shrine. Thus 
 it is in the inner orbit when love parts from love; but if the man 
 has lived an artist, a true maker, then are we all heirs of the body 
 of his thought. We have each the sacred right to muse and 
 brood over our sad possession, finding it, whatever its magnifi- 
 cence, all too poor to echo what is gone. Yesterday Stevenson 
 was ours; to-day the too-secure present has rebuked itself in 
 solemn denial, and, in the noble phrasing of an elder speech: 
 He is not. 
 
 Yesterday it was a commonplace of criticism to name him the 
 greatest living master of English style, sharing the unvexed throne 
 with Ruskin only. To-day has brought the hour for pondering 
 over our treasures, and bethinking ourselves wherein their beauty 
 lay, that thereby our gratitude and worship may increase. We 
 cannot go too far; such keen espial will only point the way by 
 beauty led, and unveil plenitude of fair device. 
 
 We know his life in part, its outer form and circumstance. 
 Smilingly reminiscent, he gave us, briefly but generously, a 
 biography of the only sort that really concerns us; such as touched 
 upon his work and the creed to which he set his days. He was 
 inevitably confidential, personal, intimate; life was so bewilder- 
 ing, so rich! How should he, a curious child, standing with eye 
 to crevice, fail to call out, in wonder and delight: "I see! I 
 hear! O listen, look with me!" So much he gave us, of his own 
 good-will, and we claim no right to more. If the friend o{ his 
 heart, or those leal comrades to whom his soul spoke with up- 
 lifted visor, unravel some of his mystery, we are rich indeed; 
 but failing that, such as we saw him *Mn his habit as he lived," 
 what was he .? Earliest of all, a child comp'act of strange differ- 
 ences, so cunningly woven that the world appealed to him on a 
 hundred sides, and yet could not o'erthrow him. The channels 
 running toward that quickening soul were many and free; they 
 8 
 
brought innumerable vivifying influences to w^hich lesser men are 
 strangers; they were the avenues of innumerable sickening fears. 
 For though Nature play the fairy, loving and lavish in gifts, she 
 keeps the sphynxlike impartiality of her common mien. She 
 denies no effect, be the cause legitimate. If the key fit the lock, 
 the door opens, though to Death himself; and when she fashions 
 a soul so sensitive that the winds of heaven evoke from it a happy 
 harmony, she does not deny it the shrieking discord of ** blasts 
 from hell." Yet the child must have had an unwonted balance 
 of will and temperance of judgment, since the conflicting strains 
 of his nature wove themselves into a texture so fine and warm. 
 For his ethic bent, he looks shrewdly back to his grandfather, 
 the old divine. ** Even as I write the phrase, he moves in my 
 blood, and whispers words to me, and sits efficient in the very 
 knot and centre of my being." As that gentle scholar walked 
 the eighteenth century, — strange, bewildering thought! some 
 part of Robert Louis to-be, walked with him, and nestled in his 
 heart; and in Robert Louis, the writer, the old divine still 
 acted after his mortal part had long been dust. 
 
 From Thomas Stevenson, his father, the child undoubtedly 
 drew a royal disregard of the practical difficulties of life; he 
 breathed the spirit of one who battles with the sea. This 
 Thomas Stevenson was also, though in less measure than his 
 radiant son, compact of opposites. The sternness arid mel- 
 ancholy of the north lived in him, not quite at peace with the 
 vivacity of the south; ** shrewd and childish, passionately at- 
 tached, passionately prejudiced, a man of many extremes, many 
 faults of temper, and no very stable foothold for himself among 
 life's troubles," a generous citizen, and a fastidious lover of 
 fitting words. He was one in a close-knit line of beacon- 
 builders, and it would be strange if hereditary virtue were not 
 engendered by such unbroken warfare against wind and wave. 
 Men of other homely occupations helped to found this princely 
 lineage, and it was possibly theirs to generate in the child his love 
 and understanding of the honest tasking that lies near the earth. 
 Still more remote (but many a league removed from that oldest 
 ancestor of all. Probably Arboreal, on whom he casts a whimsy 
 look), it is inevitable to conclude that some gypsy strain sent 
 down to him its craving for the wild and free. But this of his 
 inheritance only so far as it affected his work; of the man him- 
 self, known in a measure through his books, something later. 
 (And with him, as with all, patently as dew is water, the style 
 is the man.) 9 
 
The boy Louis was a dreamer, the lord and subject of good, 
 heady dreams, colored brighter than the darling prints of that 
 early playtime, gayer than mortal '^crimson lake (hark to the 
 sound of it — crimson lake! — the horns of elf-land are not richer 
 on the ear) — with crimson lake and Prussian blue and a certain 
 purple. . . . Titian could not equal." There were dreams to 
 sell, in those days; and in that market, little Louis bought ** two- 
 pence colored" every time. No more fascinating self-betrayal 
 shall be found, though you seek it in all literature, than his 
 Chapter on Dreams; not so much for the worth of knowing how 
 Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were born from nightmare chaos 
 and Olaila's hideous destiny took form in sleep, as that it lights up 
 the very tissue of that throbbing brain, flamingly alive in boy 
 and man. At first and often, the dreams were like pure sensa- 
 tion, simple as a line upon a slate: "a certain hue of brown," 
 of which the child had inconceivable horror and loathing at 
 night, though none whatever by day, or a personal torture 
 wrought from the two traceable experiences of urgent school 
 tasks and the dread of death and judgment. But these tricksy 
 phantoms of the night soon became embodied; they lived, and put 
 their feet to action. His setting forth to sleep, like that of his 
 father, was to the accompaniment of imagined stories, straight- 
 way to be acted on the stage of dreams by his little people, 
 his Brownies. Vividly active sprites, they were the mimes 
 and jesters of his nightly court; but all the pretty poetry of their 
 existence sank into prose when their master and task-fellow be- 
 gan to spin webs for the public eye. Thenceforth they ran in 
 harness, and knew the road to market. Every hint of their 
 blazonry speaks such a continuous pageant of mental joy and ac- 
 tion as makes our richest day seem poor. Scotland's skies are 
 gray, but the warm little theatre of one boy's brain glowed 
 brighter than her heather; here were glancing swords, and beat- 
 ing hoofs, and here heroic action of the wars. He put a girdle 
 round the earth; he lived in Spain. 
 
 Poor mortals, most of us trail through fagging hours, and then 
 lie down to dullard lethargy, or formless, uncouth visions at the 
 best ; here was a creature divinely endowed to sap the very veins 
 of life all day, and view her mimic counterpart by night, not 
 untired, it is true, but tossed, like Fortune's shuttlecock, from 
 peak to peak. Unripe, as yet, for dull academies, he was the 
 pupil of sense ; before he could be taught to know. Nature, the 
 handmaid of God, fed his hungry capacity, and made him feel. 
 
And so was the growing soul inured to its great and unsuspected 
 destiny. 
 
 The outer facts of his life are prettily diverse and briefly told. 
 Suffice it to know that he was born, a Scot, in 1850, and that 
 he loafed and lived at the University of Edinburgh ; that he was 
 predestined to engineering, and when he elected to follow the 
 profession of letters, was released from his rougher task and 
 pushed into the law; that, **aye writin', aye writin'," he 
 gently and insistently refrained from practicing this imposed 
 profession; that he spent years in search of a sky under which 
 he might barely live, and that he died at Samoa, in an enforced 
 content, a ruler of hearts among the island people, Tusitala, the 
 story-teller, and their virtual king. The rest, or its alphabet, 
 shall be read backwards from the mirror of his work. 
 
 No autobiography was ever more quaintly dressed in a true 
 simplicity than Robert Louis Stevenson's confession to the gaping 
 public of the method whereby he learned to write ; a straight- 
 forward narrative, quite devoid of implication that his anvil's fire 
 was lighted from the sun. Ignore with him his nearness to the 
 one Source of spark and heat, and view him as he stands, ham- 
 mer in hand, strong in determination to become a cunning arti- 
 ficer of words. How did he do it ? So far as the tyro reads, 
 by common means and dull, throwing heavy testimony on the 
 side of the ill-emphasized platitude that genius is only the 
 capacity for taking infinite pains. He kept pencil and paper by 
 him, and wrote continuously, seeking form and form only, and 
 serving an apprenticeship vastly like his own presentment of the 
 artist life at Fontainebleau. For (as he says of the young fra- 
 ternity who herd together there, spending breathless passion on 
 studies destined never to be pictures) to the crude student, form 
 is rightly everything, and matter merely a feather-weight. He 
 but learns to use his tools, scrupling not to work in the manner 
 of other men, and making palpable imitation the basis of true 
 art. 
 
 What student among the few who have bowed their backs to 
 toil, has had Stevenson's coolness of purpose, his acquiescence 
 in results ? For though the ordinary prentice may set his hand 
 to the mastery of form, knowing his own crass ignorance, yet, 
 with the fatuity of youth, he half expects to find the outcome 
 pregnant of wonder. He believes much in the divinity of 
 chance. Surely the giant oak must lie in seeds engendered by 
 so hot a sun ! You could no more surprise him with the news 
 
 II 
 
that some crude page of his had set the world a-praising than you 
 could kill his hope by crushing it, an empty husk. And all the 
 time he is telling himself Keats died at twenty-six, and maunder- 
 ing over Chatterton, not so much that he was ** marvellous,'* 
 but marvellous and a boy. Stevenson was not altogether un- 
 touched by this malady of youth, this green-sickness of author- 
 ship; but it passed him lightly by. He is palpably the clearest- 
 minded of men, and there is no reason for doubting either his 
 interpretation or his memory in the statement that he deliberately 
 sat down to write for the satisfaction of the deed, and that, when 
 his manuscript was refused or mercilessly condemned, he ac- 
 quiesced in the fiat without rancor and without surprise. For a 
 time, he was merely an echo of the fuller voices, the trained, 
 canorous quiring of the great. In the school of art, he grew up 
 a man of many loves, and these he names frankly, v/ith grateful 
 homage, content to acknowledge their influence from an origi- 
 nality so vital that all might strengthen it, and none impair it. 
 
 That he should so unconcernedly have borne testimony to this 
 self-imposed schooling is eminently well for us who come after 
 him; especially for those who, born with a noteworthy aptitude, 
 are misled into cruel use of it by a mistaken idea of the sanctity 
 of carelessness, the plenary force of inspiration. With a naive 
 belief in the sacredness of power, such fear to meddle with their 
 trust, as they were the children of Israel and their treasure the 
 Tables of Stone. But this man, an acknowledged sovereign over 
 vast accomplishment, demonstrates, in his own proper person, 
 that literature is an art to be learned; and that, as the painter 
 may not disdain mastership from the few who sit in state within 
 the inner chamber, and as the musician finds his way through 
 pains to harmony, so the man of letters shall by no means ad- 
 vance by a certain divine hit-or-miss progress, like a beetle bung- 
 ling toward the light. 
 
 Perhaps the enormous egotism of youth infected this master 
 workman only in those early days when, a prey to sickness and the 
 thought of death, he wasted the hours over his Voces Fidelium 
 with a yearning desire for their permanence when he should be 
 no more; a straining belief that they might bear testimony for him 
 after he had fallen into dust. But here, also, wise, fostering 
 chances came to his rescue, and restrained him to healthier 
 courses, before yet he saw clearly enough to exercise a free 
 choice and save himself. It is curious indeed to dream on the 
 possible career of one so starred by divers gifts, — child of the 
 
sun and yet the victim of earthly languor — and guess what he 
 might have become under less robust conditions. What if he had 
 drifted into the student's ways, with arduous hours in libraries, 
 under the spell of memory and the past! But now his father's 
 profession claimed him, like a heartening wind over great stretches 
 of plain, bringing ever the salt smack of the health-renewing sea. 
 In place of moping over Greek roots, or galloping with English 
 rhythm, he was drinking into that thirsty mind of his tales of 
 great onslaughts valiantly withstood, the warfare of wave on 
 masonry, perennial strife between the old, old craft of building 
 and the force of tide and storm. He travelled with his 
 father from point to point along the coast; he met the wind 
 face to face; he lingered upon docks, and his heart rose to the 
 spreading canvas, and tracked the beneficent wonder-birds of 
 commerce, until they dipped below the horizon and were lost in 
 dreams. The boy must have done a deal of voyaging then, 
 almost as much as his mind effected by night. Homekeeping 
 was not for him, and he knew it early and followed his fancy 
 late. Here lies a word of his own testimony, vivid and con- 
 clusive, filling the gap of supposition: — 
 
 " It [his education as an engineer] takes a man into the open 
 air; it keeps him hanging about harbour-sides, which is the 
 richest form of idling; it carries him to wild islands; it gives him 
 a taste of the genial dangers of the sea; it supplies him with dex- 
 terities to exercise; it makes demands upon his ingenuity; it will 
 go far to cure him of any taste (if ever he had one) for the 
 miserable life of cities. And when it has done so, it carries him 
 back and shuts him in an office! From the roaring skerry and 
 the wet thwart of the tossing boat, he passes to the stool and 
 desk; and with a memory full of ships, and seas, and perilous 
 headlands, and the shining pharos, he must apply his long- 
 sighted eyes to the petty niceties of drawing, or measure his 
 inaccurate mind with several pages of consecutive figures. He is 
 a wise fouih, to be sure, who can balance one part of genuine 
 life against two parts of drudgery between four walls, and for the 
 sake of the one, manfully accept the other." 
 
 Every word touching his university career moves the mind to 
 gratitude that he was not too far misled upon the beaten routes 
 of fact, and had, according to his own tale, the insolent bravery 
 to remain a careless student. For, from the first, and still in 
 growing measure, life was more to him than books ; his course 
 was ever a deflection from the cut-and-dried programmes of 
 
 13 
 
preparation to the secret places of joy, where unseen ministers 
 lurked, to watch and tend him. But even if he could confess, in 
 humorous "retrospect, that ** no one ever played the truant with 
 more deliberate care, and none ever had more certificates for less 
 education," the University vouchsafed him something better 
 than the accumulated wisdom of a hundred text-books ; that 
 ** ruddy drop of manly blood" transfused from friendship's 
 veins to make the heart throb quicker and more ardently. 
 There he fell across Fleeming Jenkin, Professor of Engineering, 
 a nature rare among thousands. To read Stevenson's own 
 Memoir of Jenkin is to learn how potently, how humanly, lay 
 upon him the spell of that high and striving spirit. Indeed, the 
 book is more than the portrait of **a good man of most dear 
 memory" ; it is a lucid interpretation of Stevenson's own point 
 of view in biography, and of the qualities he chiefly loved. 
 To him, Jenkin was an acknowledged leader; not, how- 
 ever, to be implicitly followed, for there were times when he 
 enforced a tactless judgment, and left his pupil bruised and bleed- 
 ing. Such error was inevitable in one of Jenkin's calibre: a man 
 of extremes, for many years of his life, until experience had 
 moulded him, brusque in speech, rash in opinion, a hot-headed 
 champion, always ready for the fray, and holding the foreign 
 ground of a quickly-conceived argument as if it were his im- 
 memorial freehold ; yet so truly humble, so tractable through 
 the affections, so honestly worshipful of the right, that his very 
 existence sang like an appeal straight to the honor-loving heart. 
 His simplicity of purpose, his chivalry of feeling must have 
 strengthened daily in Stevenson that line fibre born of gentle- 
 hood, and his heroic ideals heartened the lad anew for the 
 arduous warfare of the opening world ; in equal measure, must 
 his reverence for workmanship have confirmed every nascent 
 desire of a flawless technique. 
 
 Jenkin delighted in the Greeks, their obedience to proportion 
 and absolute beauty. He was a student of the drama, and held 
 red-hot opinions on the artificial requirements of the stage and 
 the exigent art of acting. He reduced the principles of blank 
 verse to involved laws of rhythm, betokening keen study and a 
 delicate ear. Such fervor of speculation could do no less than 
 set the younger man's mind to throbbing anew over the quest 
 of hidden springs of harmony in prose and verse, and unravelling 
 the web that hangs about the chamber of all aesthetic delight. 
 
 To know one man who has chosen conscientious workman- 
 
 H 
 
ship for the religion of his life, is a liberal education; to imbibe 
 the atmosphere of a nation tacitly sworn to such worship, is to 
 ** hitch your wagon to a star," and fall in with the harmonious 
 order of creation, moving, though slowly, toward loveliness and 
 truth. Among the formative influences on Stevenson's mind, 
 who shall overestimate the spirit of France ? His vivid, breathing 
 picture of student life at Fontainebleau is a bold black-and-white, 
 struck off in some moment of happy inspiration, of the Wander- 
 jahr of youth. There in the Forest linger, for a happy inter- 
 lude, the chosen people, dreaming, learning, scaling heaven with 
 desire; the moment of youth once passed, and their happy pren- 
 ticeship over, they flit away into the rasping world, to fill the 
 Salon, and starve in garrets, or brighten the walls of Croesus' 
 gallery. That clear sky, the dark, rich forest, the romance of 
 the scene! these fire the soul, while the sweet content of days 
 spent in the toil more restful than any idleness, fosters a new 
 birth, a happy influx of vital force. 
 
 The artist fraternity thrive, as in natal air, amid the hour's 
 bright voluptuousness, the gay comradeship, the charm of kindred 
 pursuits; and the literary man in their midst, though he give 
 himself over utterly to the delights of pure Bohemian living, is 
 transfigured into an eager spirit, instinct with fiery desires and 
 great imaginings. He is prepared for action by the fever of 
 futile dreams; colossal visions paint themselves on his brain, and 
 though they fail and fade, the memory of their burning there 
 has touched the tissue of his mind forever to finer action. More 
 pregnant still, he has imbibed that ** something, in the very air 
 of France that communicates the love of style. Precision, 
 clarity, the cleanly and crafty employment of material, a grace 
 in the handling, apart from any value in the thought, seem to be 
 acquired by the mere residence; or if not acquired, become at 
 least the more appreciated. The air of Paris is alive with this 
 technical inspiration. And to leave that airy city, and awake 
 next day upon the borders of the forest, is but to change ex- 
 ternals. The same spirit of dexterity and finish breathes from 
 the long alleys and the lofty groves, from the wildernesses that 
 are still pretty in their confusion, and the great plain that con- 
 trives to be decorative in its emptiness." 
 
 If Stevenson needed to be hewn into shape, to be polished, 
 trimmed, and made to fit the groove run by eternal verities, 
 he must have had that happy discipline during ever so short 
 a stay among the traditions of the one nation of workmen. He 
 
 15 
 
could not have failed to imbibe from the Gallic spirit that which 
 comes nearest its informing religion, the ** passion for perfec- 
 tion,*' and to learn anew what so rich a nature is ever slow 
 in grasping, the harmony of a just proportion, the beauty of 
 restraint. 
 
 A man who is a reader of many books, yet in whom the 
 critical faculty lies dead or dormant, owned once, in a burst of 
 surprise at the concensus of opinion among English-lovers, that 
 for his own poor part, he had never given a thought to Steven- 
 son's style. **For," said he, 'Mt is perfectly simple." That 
 seemed to me the topmost leaf of praise, except that I 
 should amend it by a word and call it almost perfectly simple. 
 Sometimes it becomes entirely so, and then you see the true, 
 inverted image, art mirroring the world. Again, though rarely, 
 you shall guess out some patient chiselling whereby the gem was 
 cut, and even if the sun strike from it now a ray like light itself, 
 you remember the serious pains, the tentative shiftings of that 
 foregone process and marvel more than you enjoy. But the 
 time was coming, if this mortal base of things had not failed be- 
 neath his feet, when he would have used his pen, at every unerr- 
 ing stroke, like another hand, in large unconsciousness; when 
 words would have fitted themselves to thought like angels' song to 
 heavenly lyre, in succession so harmonious that no one note 
 could be imagined otherwise. "For," says Clough, "poetry, 
 like science, has its final precision; and there are expressions of 
 poetic knowledge which can no more be rewritten than can the 
 elements of geometry. There are pieces of poetic language 
 which, try as men will, they will simply have to recur to, and 
 confess that it has been done before them." Art is living and 
 her precedents are ever forming. As age on age has laid the 
 pillars of the earth, so day by day has built the pinnacles of 
 thought above her air, and given them permanence. A few are 
 born with authority to catch the fleeting influence of the hour, 
 and bind it in imperishable form; Stevenson was one. At his best, 
 he made the phrases hereafter to be used and treasured, but never 
 made again. And the greatest was to come. True, he was 
 ever the master, large in expedient, learned in device, but an 
 art developing as his would inevitably have developed to the 
 last, under a sway so potent, must in the end have become al- 
 together plastic. **I would fain be to the Eternal Goodness 
 what his own hand is to a man," is the aspiring cry from 
 the old Theologia Germanica. So, reverently be it said, would 
 i6 
 
have become the spiritual marrying of this man and his art, 
 had time, and time alone, fostered their gradual union. In that 
 happy future, he must have grown so unconscious of his manner 
 of saying that he could have said all to us without reserve; we 
 might have been trusted with his inner thoughts, the daring and 
 the delicate. Giving thus unconstrainedly, the act would have 
 had the largeness and divinity of the gifts of love, perfect only 
 when self is unremembered. But to guess what might have 
 been had we followed the spirit further who hung entranced 
 upon its shorter way, is to quarrel with the sunrise. Such as 
 we knew him, he was like none other; temperate in the midst of 
 fantasy; a serenely-smiling landscape, though played upon by all 
 the lights of heaven; full of a happy humor, yet persistent in 
 remaining untouched by bitterness; alive to the ironies of life, 
 yet never dabbling wantonly in its cruelty; a master of orna- 
 ment, but the priest of simplicity; and above all, so diverse 
 in gifts that his work might easily have become beauty run 
 mad, had not his passion for the true bound it within her happy 
 trammeling. 
 
 In his own Essay on Style, he deprecates the shrinking of the 
 many who would never, of themselves, resolve a finished work 
 into its ultimate elements. He hesitates before disclosing the 
 scene-painter's art to a man who would otherwise swear he 
 looked upon real trees in the forest of Arden. He shrewdly 
 suspects the existence among the unlearned of those who will 
 look down upon the happy device of a quick eye and a practised 
 hand as the tricks of the trade; but nevertheless he throws open 
 the workshop, knowing how gladly the true artist will step 
 within, to muse, and ponder, and revere the more, while the un- 
 critical multitude but stare and mouth, and go away to spill their 
 spleen. To apply to his own work the very method of analysis 
 employed in this same essay, and unravel where he wove, is to 
 meet beauty face to face, a snow-crystal far more entrancing 
 underneath the lens than in its floating vagueness and entirety. 
 He is, above all, a master of directness enriched by diversity. 
 He tells a story with the unpretending vividness of an eye-wit- 
 ness, the while he draws upon that priceless gift of illuminating 
 the barest fact with light that, for the untaught eye, was never 
 yet on sea or land, and adds a glory to the heavens themselves, 
 by true interpretation of their countenance. Read certain of 
 his simplest pages and you feel the mind expand, as one should 
 hear a sculptor's exposition of the human form, and thenceforth 
 
 17 
 
view that fairest temple with a finer insight, a purer love. Na- 
 ture is not inadequate, conned thus at second-hand; taught by a 
 master to observe, you begin to see her through poetic eyes, 
 and so, at last, to see her truly. 
 
 In a mind so bountiful, what crowding imagery must have 
 risen at every breath! Fancies must have clothed themselves, 
 at the outset, in drapery too rich and heavy for the common 
 wear. Life was, indeed, for him, a procession clad in purple. 
 Such prodigality, be it said again, might easily have **o'erleaped 
 itself " and marched through volumes in fantastic motley. But 
 no! even at the height of vital emotion, he is ever austere 
 and temperate He never forgets the just proportions of life 
 though won upon by all the uttermost jcys of the universe. See 
 what he says of the commonest phenomena, embalming the 
 fleeting glory of a moment in immemorial phrase: 
 
 '*A11 the gold had withered out of the sky." (Do we keep 
 the twilight image so?) 
 
 **I have never seen such a night. It seemed to throw 
 calumny in the teeth of all the painters that ever dabbled in 
 starlight. The sky itself was of a ruddy, powerful, nameless, 
 changing color, dark and glossy like a serpent's back. The 
 stars, by innumerable millions, stuck boldly forth like lamps. 
 The MilkyWay was bright, like a moonlit cloud; half heaven 
 seemed Milky Way. The great luminaries shone each more 
 clearly than a winter's moon. Their light was dyed with every 
 sort of color — red, like fire; blue, like steel; green, like the 
 tracks of sunset; and so sharply did each stand forth in its own 
 lustre that there was no appearance of that flat, star-spangled 
 arch we know so well in pictures, but all the hollow of heaven 
 was one chaos of contesting luminaries — a hurly-burly of stars. 
 Against this the hills and rugged tree-tops stood out redly 
 dark." 
 
 " The waves which lap so quietly about the jetties of Monte- 
 rey grow louder and larger in the distance; you can see the 
 breakers leaping high and white by day; at night, the outline of 
 the shore is traced in transparent silver by the moonlight and 
 the flying foam; and from all round, even in quiet weather, the 
 low, distant, thrilling roar of the Pacific hangs over the coast 
 and the adjacent country like smoke above a battle." 
 
 **The wind huddled the trees. The golden specks of autumn 
 in the birches tossed shiveringly. Overhead, the sky was full of 
 strings and shreds of vapour, flying, vanishing, reappearing, and 
 i8 
 
turning about an axis like tumblers, as the wind hounded them 
 through heaven." 
 
 **The wind had veered more to the north, and no longer 
 reached me in the glen; but as I was going on with my prepara- 
 tions, it drove a white cloud very swiftly over the hill-top; and 
 looking up, I was surprised to see the cloud dyed with gold. 
 In these high regions of the air, the sun was already shining as 
 at noon. If only the clouds travelled high enough, we should 
 see the same thing all night long. For it is always daylight in 
 the fields of space." 
 
 All the more primitive devices of sounds and their combina- 
 tion were open to his hand. Alliteration, that delicate-handed 
 slave but most barbaric master, served him with a deftness so 
 perfect you hardly guessed her to be there. The recurrent 
 beat of sound allured him, even in its crudest form, and one who 
 knows even slightly the texture of the Stevenson mind, will 
 guess his lasting kinship with the state of feeling described in 
 his own humorous anecdote of the Philosophical Society before 
 which one curious lad propounded the ingenious problem: 
 
 ** * What would be the result of putting a pound of potassium 
 in a pot of porter?' *I should think there would be a number 
 of interesting bi-products,' said a smatterer at my elbow; but 
 for me the tale itself has a bi-product, and stands as a type of 
 much that is most human. For this inquirer, who conceived 
 himself to burn with a zeal entirely chemical, was really im- 
 mersed in a design of a quite different nature; unconsciously to his 
 own recently-breeched intelligence, he was engaged in literature. 
 Putting, pound, potassium, pot, porter; initial p, mediant t — 
 that was his idea, poor little boy ! " 
 
 So did Emerson forget the play before him, when one phrase, 
 "the glimpses of the moon," withdrew him to another field 
 more germane to his mind; and Stevenson, though not to be 
 misled through tracts of emptiness by **jingling words," pricked 
 up his ears at their summoning, like a dozing hound who hears, 
 afar, the hunter's horn. Yet so skilful is his use of this device 
 that, in his absolutely fortunate passages, you never note it. 
 You only know that the words have a melodious succession, sound 
 following sound in measured diversity, like twisted gold and 
 silver in a braid. In his verse, it becomes, of course, more ap- 
 parent, notably and inevitably in the Child's Garden, where, with 
 a nice appreciation of the primitive form due to childish themes, 
 he allows himself a measured cadence, and constant recurrence 
 of sound. jg 
 
He has a true and delicate ear for rhythm, that haunting 
 quality born to send one sentence lilting along in darting swal- 
 low-flights, another in measured curves like the crow **to the 
 rooky wood," and the next with eagle-sweep to the mountain- 
 tops. This is forever a question of ear. It is taught in no 
 academy nor is necessarily to be apprehended by the master of 
 a system. If you have it not, you have it not, and there's an 
 end on't; no diligence shall amend your lack. Stevenson had it. 
 
 **From time to time, a warm wind rustled down the valley, 
 and set all the chestnuts dangling their bunches of foliage and 
 fruit. The ear was filled with whispering music, and the 
 shadows danced in tune." 
 
 **It was a long look forward; the future summoned me as 
 with trumpet calls, it warned me back as with a voice of weep- 
 ing and beseeching; and I thrilled and trembled on the brink of 
 life, like a childish bather on the beach." 
 
 **Such was his tenderness for others, such his instinct of fine 
 courtesy and pride, that of that impure passion of remorse he 
 never breathed a syllable. Even regret was rare with him, and 
 pointed with a jest." 
 
 **We had a shower or two, but light and flying. The air 
 was clean and sweet among all these green fields and green things 
 growing." 
 
 **The spring green brightens in the wood, or the field grows 
 black under a moving ploughshare." 
 
 And this is the moment for remembering that such love of 
 lilting progress never beguiled him into letting his work become 
 a shade more (and therefore less) than honest prose. For 
 that haunting, teasing quality of certain picturesque narrative, 
 for that bastard writing so falsely ambitious as to mislead the 
 mind, from moment to moment, into an uneasy sense of mea- 
 sured lines, an irritated desire for their perfecting, he had no 
 patience. A too-poetical prose, it is safe to guess, would have 
 repelled him more than prosaic verse carefully constructed and 
 honestly meant. 
 
 He had an inborn delight in names for their own sake, quite 
 independent of their association and birth. As Southey cher- 
 ished the scheme of planting his Pantisocracy on the banks of 
 the Susquehanna because the river's name chimed happily with 
 his thought, and as many of us hold the nightingale the closer- 
 wedded to music for the fall of her three melodious syllables, so 
 is it ever with him. One of his paragraphs especially so feeds 
 
the appetite for empty sound that I have to rehearse it, 
 not because I have walked by Allan Water or know the voice of 
 the trickling of Allermuir, but because it richly ministers to 
 love of melody alone. 
 
 **But the streams of Scotland are incomparable in themselves 
 — or I am only the more Scottish to suppose so — and their 
 sound and colour dwell forever in the memory. How often 
 and willingly do I not look again in fancy on Tummel, or 
 Manor, or the talking Airdle, or Dee swirling in its Lynn; on 
 the bright burn of Kinnaird, or the golden burn that pours and 
 sulks in the den behind Kingussie ! I think shame to leave out 
 one of these enchantresses, but the list would grow too long if 
 I remembered all; only I may not forget Allan Water, nor 
 birch-wetting Rogie, nor yet Almond; nor, for all its pollutions, 
 that water of Leith of the many and well-named mills — Bell's 
 Mills, and Canon Mills, and Silver Mills; nor Redford Burn of 
 pleasant memories; nor yet, for all its smallness, that nameless 
 trickle that springs in the green bosom of Allermuir, and is fed 
 from Halkerside with a perennial teacupful, and threads the moss 
 under the Shearer's Knowe, and makes one pool there, overhung 
 by a rock, where I loved to sit and make bad verses, and is then 
 kidnapped in its infancy by subterranean pipes for the service of 
 the sea-beholding city in the plain." 
 
 Yet, caressing words for their comeliness, he was never be- 
 trayed into the maze of empty sound; the universe meant too 
 much to him. Being, to his mind, was ever more than singing, 
 and a golden sunrise put even ringing periods to scorn. 
 
 Inseparable from his mastery over rhythm, stands his manipula- 
 tion of the perfect sequence of phrase and sentence, the fortunate 
 close. As in music, a transposed measure yearns back to the 
 keynote, for which the ear has been longing, though uncon- 
 sciously, all the while, so will his periods settle gently to earth, 
 and let the mind breathe and recover, before the lark begins 
 again. But here, also, he avoids the snare of ending too often 
 on a one-syllabled word, a beguiling device calculated, when run 
 too far, to make pseudo-poetry out of prose. You come upon 
 one such restful drop and conclusion and then another; but just 
 as the spying mind cries out in triumph at having discovered a 
 method (like seeing the rabbit go into the hat), the magician 
 turns coolly about, and does it another way. Now he closes 
 with two syllables, and again with three, lest simplicity become 
 hide-bound, without the unexpected and diverse. Yet not all 
 
this nicety is a conscious taking thought for the sentence, O 
 learner of a master's art! He needs not to say, **Here is bar- 
 renness clamoring for the enrichment of diversity; so to't with 
 another syllable!" Nay, any more than your musician, at his 
 improvising, shall murmur, ** The first, third and fifth," in 
 striking the perfect chord; he simply feels out the higher har- 
 mony through a divine instinct perfected by happy use. 
 
 Down to the barest bones of language, his mastery holds. 
 With that large carelessness so deluding to the onlooker, he 
 steers merrily past the ordinary pitfalls of composition, and 
 you grow light-hearted in his company, fancying none are there. 
 So does he control and almost efface the relative pronoun, apt 
 always to obtrude its presence, like mastic oozing through a 
 loosely-laid mosaic. He is chary enough of the present partici- 
 ple, effective in the piling-up of rhetorical periods, but too un- 
 wieldy for his dainty and delicate purposes. 
 
 Everywhere shall you come upon the same considered work- 
 manship, though differing in splendor. Poetry can scarce rise 
 higher than the Panlike eloquence of Virginibus Puerisque, and 
 when you follow him afield, you shall find the earth and heaven 
 illuminated with touch on touch of incommunicable art. The 
 humor of the world, the rare witchery of its human phases, the 
 splendor of a star, the fine remoteness of a donkey's graver 
 moods, — he knows the very word of words to paint the true 
 complexion of appearances; the word, and how to link it to its 
 fellows. If any arise capable of censuring his style, I believe it 
 will be in large and never in little. Scarcely a sentence can be 
 found unsatisfying, but the linked phrasing of paragraphs does 
 not always measure our desire. The parts are exquisite, but at 
 moments they do not cohere with the strength of stone. The 
 mind is sometimes, though briefly, drawn off the scent. Instead 
 of counting four at his periods, you count five, or, it may be, 
 seven, while you think. One sentence does not grip its neigh- 
 bor with hooks of steel, and so on through the argument. They 
 are like priceless gems unset, like flowers but loosely garlanded. 
 Thus an essay is destined to live in the memory, not as an im- 
 perishable form, but a series of beautiful successions. Is this, as 
 one asserts, because, like Emerson, he had no formulated theory 
 of life? I believe it is more, or rather less than that; it seems 
 also to refer itself to causes less abstract and more mechanical. 
 In his tendency toward picturesque statement, he ignored 
 dialectic for poetic beauty of phrase. He was less anxious to 
 
convince than to state harmoniously, and he loved each sentence 
 w^ith an individual love, turning and polishing until it waxed in 
 delicate strength and asserted itself bodily and valiantly. Thus 
 you forget the forest for the trees; you look and wonder, brood- 
 ing over each, its curious growth and beauty. Yet when all is 
 said, the most captious must own himself humbled if he turn to 
 The Lantern Bearers, and to Pulvis et Umbra, compact and per- 
 fect worlds thrown off to spin through space, in tracks of beauty 
 laid from farthest time. Old Mortality, also, holds a passage of 
 prose so harmonious and perfect as forever to defy criticism. 
 Possibly it remains for the man of single purpose to build up ar- 
 guments; the rhapsodist, to whom life calls in many voices, will 
 scarce pursue his path save by lines bending where fancy draws 
 him. Here in our doubtful day lived the sprite turned philoso- 
 pher, and praised be all the fostering gods ! he dared express 
 himself as nature bade. 
 
 It is difficult to regard his critical work studiously, save 
 with a wandering eye, drawn momently away from the canvas to 
 the artist himself. (And thus it is ever with Stevenson. You 
 go to seek a book ; you find — a man. You strive to estimate 
 his championship of beauty, and straightway it pales and loses 
 lustre beside his contribution to the code of life. For, in his 
 eyes, even literature is a small matter beside the march of shining 
 deeds, and, seen in the light of action, the rounded circle of the 
 arts forms but an added means by which we really live to look on 
 a beautiful face, or a day in June. ) It is impossible to overpraise 
 his temperance in judging another ; his dignity, as that of a gentle- 
 man among his fellows. The preface to that rich library of criti- 
 cism, the Familiar Studies of Men and Books, is almost strenu- 
 ous in its desire of speaking with justice, almost pathetic in its 
 beautiful humility. (This business of ticketing souls becomes a 
 ticklish one. He knows it, our wise Scot !) But, if you think 
 he cringes, or falters, or balks at a strong opinion, you have not 
 read him truly. He can thrust as well as another, but only un- 
 der the rules of the game. He must have his quarrel just. And 
 ever, as the mind reverts to the man Stevenson, behind the mask of 
 authority, inevitably weighing what he does by constant reference 
 to what he is, it finds him the catholic soul, and so, as heat and 
 light are one, in equal measure the soul of love. Carefully he 
 chooses his point of view, sure always to be on the hither side of 
 mercy ; but when the time does come for swords, he wields a 
 righteous blade. How he probes to the quick the poor vanity of 
 
 23 
 
Burns' s gangrened sensuality, casting aside, like a flimsy rag, the 
 spurious romance that would hide the sore ! He has no word 
 dark enough for the pity of that battle lost, the youthful armor 
 scarred, the pennon dragging in the mire, fit only now to wrap a 
 courtesan. Yet when he has illumined every dint in that marred 
 honor, and bade you remember how mercilessly clear is heaven's 
 light, be the sinner poet, ploughman or king, he hesitates ; not to 
 withdraw a line, but to bid himself be gentle in his thought. 
 Burns' s moral frivolity, his unhealthful dallying in the pathway of 
 decay and loss, offend him bitterly ; but he pauses to own not 
 only his profound compassion for this poor victim of a will 
 diseased, but to confess himself penetrated to the soul by the 
 man's desperate efforts to do right. 
 
 Stevenson had too keen a sense of humor to accord Walt Whit- 
 man an undivided homage. He wraps him in clouded praise, 
 but straightway he fears lest he may not have shown his true 
 worship for so good a man, one whom defective art could never 
 altogether condemn since he lived and saw the glory of life. 
 For Thoreau, he owns a divided love, warmly responsive to a 
 maker of English like that carved out in Concord woods, crown- 
 ing a philosophy at times so remote and rarefied ; still he confesses 
 to a noble impatience of the man who enchains him, judging him to 
 have been a skulker, a creature content to keep warm and shielded 
 in withdrawal from his kind, preserving that delicate health of 
 the soul which is more sickly than disease. For Charles of Or- 
 leans, the clever craftsman at a verse, the undecided and inactive 
 in the clamoring afi^airs of life, and for Villon, the radically un- 
 chaste of soul, he disdains no healthy thrust ; but with each, 
 ** God made him," he concludes, ** therefore let him pass for a 
 man." 
 
 Surely a more diverse company was never got together by re- 
 viewer's drum and fife ! But motley as they are, and some of 
 rhem all undeserving, in different measure he takes them to his 
 heart. Even when his pen strikes on evil deeds, he still keeps 
 the attitude that is nowhere better described than in Loudon 
 Dodd's summary of his own *'unconsenting fondness" for Captain 
 Nares. **The faults were all embraced in a more generous 
 view. I saw them in their place, like discords in a musical pro- 
 gression ; and accepted them and found them picturesque, as 
 we accept and admire, in the habitable face of nature, the smoky 
 head of the volcano or the pernicious thicket of the swamp." 
 
 Here is Hugo the Great, entrancing the warm-blooded critic 
 
through his romanticism ; Yoshida-Torajiro, the martyr-hero, 
 who threw his life, doubtless longing for a greater than life for 
 one cast more, into a losing, — nay, at that time, almost a non-ex- 
 istent cause ; and John Knox, woman's private sympathizer and 
 her public foe. Even Pepys, at whose pose he expresses more 
 surprise than is common with him, he accepts with a certain 
 smiling tolerance ; the frank, voluptuous enjoyment of the man, 
 his candid selfishness, his magnifying touch whereby all the com- 
 monest pleasures of life were greatened into large delights, — all 
 this facility in garnering joy for purely private ends, awoke in 
 him an aching sympathy. If Robert Louis Stevenson ever failed 
 in understanding men, it was not because he did not keep his 
 nearness to them ; if he ever struck too deep, it was not because 
 he aimed the blow in wilful blindness or in lack of awe. 
 
 He knows such deep truths of the soul and its action as if he had 
 penetrated, for one fearful moment, into the secret arcana where 
 God judges and man has ceased to guess. As life cries to him 
 from a hundred points, so also does humankind. In his sight, 
 the living soul is a thing of reverence and wonder, whatever the 
 deed it blindly did; whoever shall probe it too daringly, who- 
 ever shall wound the face of God in man, ** it were better for him 
 that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were 
 drowned in the depth of the sea. ' ' Is his brother not clear-sighted 
 nor strong of hand, to work a righteous will ? Then what ? But 
 for the grace of God, inexplicable in dealing, places had been re- 
 versed, and, *' handy, dandy, which is the justice, which is the 
 thief? '* Believing so with all his sober heart, judgment put on the 
 cap of kindliness, and became that heavenly charity we are wont 
 to glorify afar. He is so wise a man, this friend of men! For he 
 knows also that the soul is ever mute before her adversary, life. 
 She cannot express herself; still less shall she be understood, and 
 when he stands silent before her, neither quite condemning nor 
 releasing her from blame, he is like the Hindoo who dare not 
 kill, lest he strike the soul of his grandam. For we who live in 
 such fastnesses of ignorance and pain, when we take it upon our- 
 selves to flout another know not what we do. Shall we kick the 
 dog who roils the water, not guessing a prince would bathe there 
 presently? Shall we curse the blind man who falls against us 
 in the way? Shall we, who are but motes above this teeming 
 ball of energy, presume to guess the indirection of another mote, 
 spinning as mysteriously at our side? Nay, he knows better, and 
 thus is he, after Lamb, his master in letters, the most loving 
 among critics, the sparing in abuse, the prodigal of praise. 25 
 
His poetic work is very evidently not his natural utterance. Yet 
 it rings true enough to feed the desire of guessing what it might 
 have been, had the full current of his emotion dashed, foaming yet 
 deep, between the golden cliffs of rhythm and rhyme. To the 
 general eye, the maker has reached his topmost estate when he 
 sets his thought in the mould of ordered verse. Possibly we see 
 it so because we are not yet far from the childhood of the race, 
 delighting in form and pleased by melody's recurrent beat; or it 
 may be the tacit belief that man only partakes in inspiration 
 when he improvises, snatching from every air of heaven new 
 breath to voice his ecstasy. Escaped from self, he nears the 
 greater sea. In such high estimate, the requirements of verse are 
 no rigorous trammels; save as the intervals of the scale make the 
 happy limitations of harmony, or as God has set a measure to 
 the tide. If we, the underlings of letters, find in ourselves but 
 a glowing of the rage for rhyme, we fan it mightily, and work 
 ourselves up, under its *' whiff and wind," into a dervish fury. 
 But with Stevenson, great prose was evidently more to be de- 
 sired than monumental verse; he could write in rhyme, but *' he 
 had elsewhere his inheritance." He is master of a true and 
 lucid blank verse (strangely enough, for under Fleeming Jenkin 
 he must have followed such over-refinements of analysis as to 
 paralyze a less buoyant mind, drive the creative sense out of door, 
 and leave invention sitting idle in a barren house), and his 
 rhymed couplets are at times extraordinarily delicate in touch and 
 finish. The House Beautiful, inviting to the inner sense as fine 
 frostwork upon glass, has the touch of Emerson in his more dry- 
 adic moods, like horn calling unto echo, while we, poised in 
 our skiff between, listen and wait, scarce knowing which is 
 lovelier. This is the note of the shepherd philosopher who 
 reads the heavens and sees all's well, though his carpeting be of 
 sod, and the stars his only light; this is the wood-spirit, informed 
 and set aflame with all the joy of being. Like Emerson, too, 
 he beholds the vision of evanescent beauty, the rapt, elusive 
 sprite, the happy sequence of joy never quite attained. The 
 Garden breathes all the simplicity of an Horatian message; the 
 word of one who loves trifles, finding nothing too small to love. 
 And in verse upon verse, here and everywhere, are the pledges 
 of spiritual kinship, friend calling unto friend, the sprite from 
 his hearthstone sending skoal to James, to Henley, to Katharine 
 de Mattos, to the few among his chosen. The imprint of the 
 human is on them all. How they satisfy the ear, while yet they 
 26 
 
seek the heart ! The delicate message to Will H. Low ends in 
 four lines of ever-memorable beauty, giving forth the inevitable 
 ring of great and elemental literature : 
 
 " Where hath fleeting beauty led ? 
 To the doorway of the dead. 
 Life is over, life was gay: 
 We have come the primrose way." 
 
 The Celestial Surgeon reiterates his perpetual longing to drink 
 the all of life. ** Probe me!" he cries, in challenge of the un- 
 known physician. ** If I have not lived, leave not my heart 
 inert, but pierce it deeper, and waken it anew." Is this a 
 diviner ecstasy of being than the animating spirit of Rabbi Ben 
 Ezra, heretofore the greatest embodiment of a great consent ? 
 With Browning, the potter and his clay ; patience under pain. 
 With Stevenson, not alone the acquiescence of suffering, but the 
 quivering flesh reaching upward to the knife, as Psyche's lips to 
 Love. All this unpretending verse is sweetened by a rare 
 asceticism. He is not among those who overload the line with 
 ornament, as if a hand should be more than a hand, gaining the 
 barbarism of gems. Still will he **use all gently," but now 
 and again you come upon some perfect phrase create to haunt the 
 memory: 
 
 "For love of lovely words." 
 
 " And from the shore hear inland voices call. " 
 
 ** You put your frosted wildings forth. 
 And on the heath, afar from man, 
 A strong and bitter virgin ran." 
 
 Then again springs a spontaneous living verse, like the one 
 born of solitude and stillness among the pines : — 
 
 *' The bed was made, the room was fit. 
 By punctual eve the stars were lit ; 
 The air was still, the water ran. 
 No need was there for maid or man. 
 When we put up, my ass and I, 
 At God's green caravanserai. " 
 
 " Sing clearlier. Muse ! or evermore be still. 
 Sing truer or no longer sing ! " 
 
 27 
 
Thus does he pray for lyric health and freshness. But ever- 
 more throughout his nicety of word and phrase, sounds the 
 ceaseless aspiration for courage, for heroic doing though the hour 
 be dull. This man needed no silver trumpet to sound the onset; 
 he could have preluded Roncesvalles with a fish-horn. The 
 scope of his longing was vast, but plainly put ; it was enough if 
 he proved not unworthy those bygone generations of sea-warders, 
 who set the coast with guardian lights. Three, at least, among 
 his poems need no word of praise : his Requiem, '* In the 
 Highlands, in the country places'* (that sad reaching for the 
 *' hills of home"), and Ticonderoga, a ballad wrought in flame. 
 The Child's Garden of Verse is surely not so much a book 
 for children as for the child who lives, lone and pining, in the 
 secret soul of every one of us. It w?s transcribed within the 
 very inner circle of childhood, the fairy ring, to recall us who 
 have been pushed outside it through grosser bulk of body (not 
 of soul !) back again to our lost ineffable joys and buried griefs, 
 sweeter now than the triumphs of a later time. '* This is the 
 land," we cry. " Here lies it still, the rolling heights, the pleasant 
 ways and darkling waters. Here it is, goblin land, land o' dreams. 
 The towers are standing, unchanged save by thickening ivy-spray; 
 in twilight corners the old-time shadows lurk, far as we have 
 marched from them, this many a year. They could not follow 
 us, for other fears rose up and thrust them from the track, but 
 God be thanked ! they stayed for our revisiting." Children 
 themselves (the unfledged beings who bear the name ; not we old 
 folks, quite as little, but forced to tilt all day in armor too big, 
 and with weapons too heavy for us !), real children love the high- 
 sounding narrative, beginning ** once upon a time," and manipu- 
 lating nothing less than blood royal ; an exaggerated simplicity 
 may enwrap it, but he who would wholly please must give them a 
 picture, possibly not destitute of the grotesque, but always a pic- 
 ture. They will have rose-gardens and magic steeds, and maids 
 with golden, Maeterlinck locks, long enough to make the prince's 
 ladder; but the reminiscent emotion of the Child's Garden is 
 only the commonplace of their little day. They are like the 
 farmer, come to town and confronted by the typical rustic on the 
 stage. Give him ambrosia for festival ; not his own honey made 
 by the bees he bought and hived with his own hands ! This, 
 however, is a grown folk's poor opinion ; the vote of any dozen 
 children may give it the lie. But for us who stray into that 
 garden, and wander up and down its green-laid ways, it would 
 
be difficult to tell how truly we are at home there, how well 
 content. Not many pages read, we stop in sheer delight. **0 
 you darling! " we cry, and whether it is the child Louis we 
 mean, or the child half-forgotten yet still wakeful, in our own 
 dusty past, we know not. At least it is the child of air who 
 played once in such a garden; grown into duller estate, he has 
 plodded away, but, O happy miracle! the wraith of him lives 
 on in that garden forever. Indeed, it is possible to go further 
 and find this no individual journal, but the record of childhood 
 itself; and it thrills the heart piercingly to see the greatness and 
 littleness of the mind new to earth so truly illuminated. Listen 
 to the piping voice: — 
 
 *« The world is so full of a number of things, 
 I am sure we should all be as happy as kings." 
 
 Note the vastness of the wonder, the expression falling like a 
 stick through pure impotence of equipment! Ideas hover over 
 him like a cloud, but like a cloud, he may not grasp them; weak 
 of vision, new sights loom up before him portentously beautiful, 
 awful beyond thought, and he, the unpractised of tongue, may 
 not yet paint their seeming. Those two bald lines are a child's 
 version of 
 
 ** The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces. 
 The solemn temples, the great globe itself." 
 
 The same awe, the same recognition of majesty! but the poor 
 baby fumbles for expression as doubtless Shakespeare did, find- 
 ing even his vast words all inadequate for that comprehensive 
 vision. 
 
 To play in the Garden with Stevenson is to know him at six 
 years old even a little better than through his later confidence. 
 This was truly a JVu?iderkindy a child of dreams and fantasy. 
 All his visions were hot and sweeping; day by day, with the 
 careless strength of power, he created for himself new worlds to 
 eke out the insufficiency of this one little sphere. Lying in bed, 
 a luxurious Jove, he overlooked '* the pleasant land of counter- 
 pane," and worked his magic there. What visions had he of 
 ships in fleets, of cities builded by a wish ! Here alone did 
 Rome rise in a day, and Carthage sprang aloft unbargained for. 
 The whole world was all too small for his imagining; its farthest 
 bound was like the narrow seas to Francis Drake, In youth, 
 
 29 
 
as in his prime, it was ever **I should like to rise and go.** 
 The soul thus early shod itself with purpose, and staff in hand, 
 arose to travel bravely. No choosing of next-door orchards or 
 pleasant fields near-by; nothing will suit him short of Babylon 
 or El Dorado. But alas for childhood's prison-rules, real as the 
 bonds of age ! for all adventure ends at bed-time, that **long 
 black passage,'* and rising is not wholly to see the sunrise, but 
 to lace your shoes. Still, spite of the jealous real, he stayed 
 there as his childish state decreed, and like the Lady in her 
 tov/er, saw life go by him all imagined, quite unproved. Like 
 her, too, he saw the shadows in the glass ; for always the 
 child is wondering ** where go the boats?" questioning the 
 **wind a-blowing all day long," brooding over the armies 
 marching in the embers and the burning city crumbling black. 
 He would fain have lived through the summer of the little toy 
 soldier, buried in the garden. (How like the man Louis! 
 Ever the peerer into mystery, the greedy over fairy bread!) 
 But never mind I there are compensations to a Wunderkind as to 
 no other, he whose mind is the real kingdom and other worlds 
 but subject provinces ; for he can multiply joys to wondrous 
 issues by this same alchemy of the fancy. He, fine-eyed and 
 sharp of ear, knows w^hat realm on realm lie invisible in the 
 common garden-ground, where Uncle Jim, grown-up and dull 
 and knowing no better, smokes his pipe in leaden security, 
 thinking he treads a common earth, dedicate only to the growing 
 of cabbage. The worlds are there and Louis has made them; 
 with a turn of the hand, he can make you more. 
 
 When jewels shine so clear, what eye shall choose ? Yet if we 
 must own but one, let it be My Treasures, too perfect not to be 
 learned and quoted : 
 
 *' These nuts, that I keep in the back of the nest 
 Where all my lead soldiers are lying at rest. 
 Were gathered in autumn by nursie and me 
 In a wood with a well by the side of the sea. 
 
 This whistle we made (and how clearly it sounds!) 
 By the side of a field at the end of the grounds. 
 Of a branch of a plane, with a knife of my own. 
 It was nursie who made it, and nursie alone! 
 
 The stone, with the white and the yellow and grey. 
 We discovered I cannot tell how far away; 
 
 30 
 
And I carried it back although weary and cold. 
 For though father denies it, I'm sure it is gold. 
 
 But of all of my treasures the last is the king. 
 For there's very few children possess such a thing; 
 And that is a chisel, both handle and blade. 
 Which a man who was really a carpenter made.'* 
 
 Here, clad in honest fustian, is the pathos of a little soul's pos- 
 sessing; so small, so poor, and still so like our own maturer 
 worship of treasure all as vain that the common pain of life 
 ■ blows bitingly in upon us while we read. That not unalloyed 
 content roused within us by the feeble majesty of childhood 
 clutches at the throat; the twinge that is ever the partner of a 
 yearning love comes upon us, prompting the heart to comfort, 
 the arms to open wide. Something of the same piercing quality 
 is in Coventry Patmore's remorseful lines. The Toys. But 
 there the pathos, being so palpably **an assault upon the feel- 
 ings," can be borne; My Treasures exists, not that you may 
 spin a moral, but only that you may remember the contentment 
 of youth. 
 
 Stevenson, the story-teller, is secure of praise. For though 
 ultimate criticism will inevitably point, for his monument, to 
 the essays and descriptive prose, the lover of hearty deeds 
 will still disport his fancy in those charmed pages of adven- 
 ture. Here was the true romantic, who chose to portray 
 life, not as it is, but as it might be any day in any year; life 
 stuffed full of virile deeds, — sailing the sea, striking great blows 
 and growing lustily thereby. He loved to feed men on the meat 
 of action, to heat their blood red-hot, and move them with the 
 joy and knowledge of being. This was the choice of one who 
 had never lost the child out of his inmost spirit. Not for him 
 was the middle-aged yearning over dreams obscured, like morning 
 stars, by day's full splendor; his eyes saw ever with their early 
 clearness, and the wisdom of his prime spoke nowhere more 
 weightily than in commending a serious attitude toward happy 
 make-believe. ** Measure tape all day if you must," runs the 
 tune of his implication, '*but at sundown, fall to graver matters, 
 and come out to play. Very possibly you have no ships and 
 islands of your own, but I can spare you one or two. Turn a 
 page, and you find them." Living, as he did, within that 
 sanctuary of divine insight surrounded by the glory-clouds of 
 youth, he saw no reason why as good a game should not be 
 
 31 
 
played on the open sea or by a rigorous coast, as behind the 
 sofa-backs while the grown folks are battering away at their own 
 dull device of talk. He extended his stage, intensified his 
 motives, and the thing was done. The king of romantics, 
 there was one choice in the world of letters to which his ima- 
 gination steadily refused to lend itself; though you flayed him, 
 you could not make him understand why, in the land of books, 
 we should deliberately prefer to be dull; nor why, for our 
 amusement, we should repeat the dreary routine of our poor 
 common day, when we might tilt on a Field of the Cloth of 
 Gold, with kings for company, were they but the kings of 
 roguery. He loved **a piece of purple"; he would have it 
 flaunted for sash or banner, though our doublet be of frieze. 
 And all day long, he heard the bird of the ideal, the promiser 
 of joy ineffable, the chorister beside the altar of beauty, singing 
 before him in the darkling woods. 
 
 Remembering his comparison of Hugo, Scott and Fielding, 
 you are tempted to set his attainment before the mirroring of 
 that great company, seeking especially the bonds of likeness or 
 difference between him and the two of his own tongue. Field- 
 ing, said he, was a creator of men and women warm with the 
 vital action of the soul, and owing no whit of their reality to 
 the accessories of time and place. He saw humanity as the 
 playwright sees it, against a background broadly indicated, 
 suggestive merely of life. His world was governed by indi- 
 vidual interests alone; the spirit of the times might cry ever 
 so loudly, but the voice of his puppets struck clearlier on the 
 scanty furnishing of his mimic stage. Scott was the exponent 
 of a civilization becoming every day more complex, and he 
 imbibed inevitably that sense of proportion incidental to a larger 
 field; he learned how inextricably individual deeds are inter- 
 woven with what we are pleased to call great events merely 
 because we see them in the aggregate. At last it had become 
 somewhat important to the romancer that Scotland should be 
 shaken by war or turmoil, for individual fortunes were thereby 
 discomfited, and M. and N. could no longer love or strive, un- 
 conscious of the pother o'er their heads. Thus did the epical 
 hero dwindle to the actor in romance, and thenceforth his deeds 
 were decked out and played upon by a rich profusion of means 
 unsought by the robust chronicler who led the way. 
 
 Stevenson, making deliberate choice between the novel of in- 
 cident and the novel of character, left the intricacies of human 
 32 
 
conduct to such as love a laboratory, and yawn in the open air. 
 He undoubtedly wore his heirship to Scott with all the pride 
 of lineage. It seemed peculiarly the heirship of kin, for each 
 was pure story-teller and Scotland's own. But the prince, be- 
 come sovereign, extended his realm through valor waxing great, 
 and bestowed upon it a transcending power. Not only inventor 
 but artist to the finest fibre, he carried onsets whither Scott never 
 could have followed, carving deeds with impalpable art where 
 the other hacked and hewed. 
 
 If Scott marched a pace in advance of Fielding in the selec- 
 tion of fitting scenery for action, Stevenson was far removed 
 from both. Places were continually appealing to him with sug- 
 gestions of dead and gone story, or beseeching him to vivify them 
 with deeds. One, the Isle of Earraid, had so insistent a hold 
 on his imagination that it would not leave him at peace, and he 
 might not rid himself of the clamorous ghost by even once laying it 
 in print. There he *'put a whole family," and later con- 
 demned a shivering hero to exile on its coast, and then he 
 must fain describe it again, with all its cloudy moods and the 
 vague surmises cropping out from it, like weeds upon a ruin. 
 He owns the fascination fixed upon him by rocks engirt with 
 pools on a solitary shore. ** What scenes have been enacted 
 there ? " he muses. ** What deeds are yet to spring ? " With 
 art's painstaking nicety, he selects a scene ; or, it may be, the 
 scene selects him, and the story wills of its own strength to be 
 written. Conducted thither, you never quarrel with his choice. 
 The solitary, ramshackle estate of Shaws, in Kidnapped, the boom- 
 ing of the wave in Treasure Island, the rock-begirt isolation in 
 The Merry Men, the cosmic loneliness of that dazzling stage 
 where hell defied high heaven in The Ebb-Tide, — once there, 
 the narrative seizes hold upon you before its pages are well begun. 
 This is the attitude of the pure romancer, aiming first and always 
 at the air of telling a story as it really was ; reproducing the very 
 color of the time, making you hear the rote of the sea as it 
 dinned itself into the hero's ear, and feel how cold, and wet 
 and weariness washed their tints upon his aching flesh. It is the 
 noble, primitive idea of naked narrative ; neither rent with 
 analysis nor clouded by moral polemics, but addressed only to the 
 hale fancy of the robuster nature within us all, which needs only 
 feeding to live. It is the sole manner of invention made to 
 send a story singing down from father to son, from bard to bard, 
 in the old melodic days. 
 
 33 
 
Like every sensitive, fancy-driven soul, sick to death, at 
 times, of earth's boding and horror, Stevenson has learned 
 every lineament in the face of fear, loathsome twin brother of 
 danger and ministrant to the grave. And as menace is the in- 
 forming soul of romance, so fear walks beside it, and poisons the 
 very sky with fetid breath. In the more transparent art of com- 
 mon workmen, personal adventures crowd in series, and the 
 narrator retains your ear by piling peril upon peril; but Steven- 
 son craftily heightens the apprehension of the man beset by 
 bodily danger through superadding a secondary fear, born of 
 darkness and the strange places of the earth. That breathless 
 tale. The Pavilion on the Links, serves well for sole example of 
 such cunning; for the character of the place, augmenting the 
 emotions of the hour, as in The Fall of the House of Usher, 
 goes far toward working the reader into a state of tension 
 rendering the catastrophe a positive relief. ** Poison or pistol 
 shot! " we cry. ''Only deliver us from the body of this un- 
 seen death ! " 
 
 ** The country, I have said, was mixed sand-hills and links; 
 links being a Scottish name for sand which has ceased drifting 
 and become more or less solidly covered with turf. The 
 pavilion stood on an even space; a little behind it, the wood 
 began in a hedge of elders huddled together by the wind; in 
 front, a few tumbled sand-hills stood between it and the sea. 
 An outcropping of rock had formed a bastion for the sand, so 
 that there was here a promontory in the coast line between two 
 shallow bays; and just beyond the tides, the rock again cropped 
 out and formed an islet of small dimensions but strikingly 
 designed. The quicksands were of great extent at low water, 
 and had an infamous reputation in the country. On summer 
 days, the outlook was bright and even gladsome; but at sun- 
 down in September, with a high wind and a heavy surf rolling 
 in close along the links, the place told of nothing but dead 
 mariners and sea disasters. A ship beating to windward on the 
 horizon, and a huge truncheon of wreck half buried in the 
 sands at my feet, completed the innuendo of the scene. . . . 
 The place had an air of solitude that daunted even a solitary like 
 myself." 
 
 That is the phrase, ** the innuendo of the scene"! He 
 forces you to hear and taste it, even as it lies upon his own tongue 
 and within his ears; so that when the men step outside into that 
 stillness ** unbroken save by the sea-gulls and the surf," and 
 
 34 
 
where a hundred men might have lain upon the sand in ambush, 
 you feel with them their sheer inability to bide the horror of 
 inaction ; you yield with them to fear, and in your heart pas- 
 sionately adjure them to rush back under cover before it shall be 
 too late. Suspense, that other handmaid of thrilling narrative, 
 is ever under his thumb, and he holds her secrets inviolable. 
 No sooner do you begin a tale than you are set midway on the 
 track of expectation, destined often to fall into the positive ex- 
 citement of pure scare, before curiosity comes near to being 
 satisfied. Like his own treasure-seekers, we go on, stumbling 
 and prying, with now and then an assault of alarm, and only 
 draw breath again when the ship is in port, and we, poor 
 mariners ! our secret at last in the hand, can sit down and talk it 
 over. Notably in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 
 the suspense is preserved and intensified until it becomes actually 
 hysterical. To wait with the narrator while the Thing within 
 goes raging up and down, to wonder what formless birth of 
 darkness It may be, is to slip back into child-land and relive one 
 of those moments when the bogie hides behind the door, fateful 
 and supperless. Indeed, so well has the secret been kept, the 
 while he thrums our tortured nerves, that we are sadly conscious 
 of a downfall at the end ; for even a partisan, Stevenson-mad, 
 could scarcely deny that the somewhat material solution of the 
 drug oversteps the bathos of disclosure. But no mention of 
 Jekyll and Hyde shall henceforth be complete without the com- 
 ment of John Addington Sy*nonds, a familiar bit of criticism set 
 forth in a personal letter, and striking so true an ethical note as 
 virtually to close the subject. 
 
 **. . . I am trembling under the magician's wand of your 
 fancy, and rebelling against it with the scorn of a soul that hates to 
 be contaminated with the mere picture of victorious evil. Our 
 only chance seems to me to be to maintain, against all appear- 
 ances, that evil can never and in no way be victorious. . . The 
 suicide end of Dr. Jekyll is too commonplace. Dr. Jekyll 
 ought to have given Mr. Hyde up to justice. This would have 
 vindicated the sense of human dignity which is so horribly out- 
 raged in your book." 
 
 No work of Stevenson's can be so harshly criticised from the 
 artistic side, none so keenly questioned. It startles by its power, 
 it revolts through its crudity. So ought we to see the miry deeps 
 in man, but not in such a fashion, like viscera disclosed by 
 butchery. The fancy labored here; the practised hand shook and 
 
 35 
 
fumbled. One passage only recalls the master at his best, a para- 
 graph so great with the birth of a formless horror that it clamors 
 for remembrance : 
 
 ** He had now seen the full deformity of that Creature that 
 shared with him some of the phenomena of consciousness, and 
 was co-heir with him to death ; and beyond these links of com- 
 munity, which in themselves made the most poignant part of his 
 distress, he thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of 
 something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the shock- 
 ing thing ; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and 
 voices ; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned ; that 
 what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of 
 life. And this again, that the insurgent horror was knit to him 
 closer than a wife, closer than an eye ; lay caged in his flesh, 
 where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born ; at 
 every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, pre- 
 vailed against him, and deposed him out of life." 
 
 The secret forming the germ of Olalla and The Merry Men 
 is kept with the same provocative assumption of a secret to keep. 
 ** You are in suspense? Well you may be," nods the sage roman- 
 cer. ** There's pippins and cheese to come ! " In the case of 
 Treasure Island, it is remotely possible that the veteran reader, 
 the old hand at a yarn, may at once suspect Ben Gunn of having 
 been cast for the part of Deus ex Machina, and only waiting for 
 his cue ; but what wiseacre is prepared for the manner of his 
 errantry ? When the map is delivered over to Long John, few 
 among us are so dull as not to smell an ulterior purpose under 
 such engaging courtesy; but name it we cannot. Like Silver him- 
 self, we are the fool of circumstance, and though with him we 
 approach the fateful spot in baffling surmise of a trick, do we 
 dream of finding the treasure gone ? Not for a moment, and 
 we shout our bravos in an ecstasy unfeigned as our relief. Even 
 Long John himself has his hour for mocking at curiosity, and 
 reveals himself at a blow. Possibly his elaborate cloaking of 
 guileless bonhomie should have taught us to find him hollow, 
 like the hillwives, a crust of guilt ; but when Stevenson throws 
 us into a state of hypnotic belief, we go patiently on, led by the 
 nose, ready to see black and white as God made them only 
 when our magician releases us, and not before. 
 
 In working the element of fear, he depends not only upon 
 natural causes and the great psychical influences transcending 
 them, but upon means so slight yet so craftily chosen as to simu- 
 
 36 
 
late a legitimate trickery. Through touches almost unnoted at 
 the time, a reiterated note like the warning music in melodrama, 
 he wakens you to a nervous expectancy relative to some one per- 
 son or thing. Long John has all the mysterious horror born 
 of that strange wedding of his suavity of mannec and deformity 
 of soul, and you fear him as you do hell-pains ; but it is the 
 tapping of his crutch that really daunts you. Listening for it until 
 silence feeds the aching of suspense, when it does actually strike 
 upon the ear you are all agog lest, with the terrible omnipotence 
 of evil, he hobble nimbly out of the book, and appear in awful 
 person. The tapping of the blind man's stick is enough to 
 appall the stoutest heart ; and awaiting it with Jim and his 
 mother in the dusk, you are tempted to bid them balk Mr. Steven- 
 son of his purpose, let the story go unfinished, and flee the house, 
 leaving its treasure to pirates or the devil, and us within the sound 
 of Sabbath-bells forever. The veiled leper of The Black Arrow, 
 ringing his bell through the forest, on evil bent, is born to terrify 
 us quite as indubitably as Dick and Joan are moved, and that by 
 no means because the text gives us terror as their cue. He is 
 the pizzicato of the violins, sounding uncertainty and the super- 
 natural. 
 
 The primal motives are strongest, the best stories old as the 
 sun. Nothing can be better than the best, and Stevenson, with 
 the fine impartiality of the great, wasted no time in searching 
 about him for a fictitious originality. He took the strong, sim- 
 ple emotions as he found them, unhewn in immemorial quarries, 
 and wrought them into life. From furthest time there has 
 been no better furnishing discovered for the story of adventure 
 than hidden treasure, family feud, sea-fighting, the shifts of a 
 castaway, the unthinking comradeship of hero and heroine before 
 yet they are "a lover and his lass." But ever old, they emerge 
 from his hands minted anew ; his scenes are fresh as to-morrow's 
 sunrise, and the men who move there breathe and walk. An 
 involved xrharacter-study has no more legitimate place in the 
 novel of adventure than fine lace upon armor ; but character it- 
 self strives manfully there. Your hero strikes his true impact 
 upon the mind, but the moving pageant of events simply will not 
 let you sit down to examine his soul-tissues under a glass. For 
 all that, he shows a no less solid bulk in the bright, broad sun- 
 shine of his deeds. Bad and good, Stevenson's men are tangible 
 as the earth. Nobody shall henceforth win more true fealty 
 than Jim Hawkins, in very spite of his infirmities ; for Jim, with 
 
 37 
 
all his gift of taking fortune at the flood, had a slovenly habit of 
 obedience, and rode serenely over the heads of penalties. To 
 us fogies who cling unreservedly to the traditions of lavv^ and 
 order, he would have been gey ill to live wi'. Nevertheless we 
 love him, for that he is a boy, built on the old, old lines adored 
 by other boys since the day when Probably Arboreal began to 
 count the gray hairs on his poll, and tell his tales of a grand- 
 father. He is such a hero as boys themselves might have drawn, 
 though not one of them could have resisted thi temptation to 
 multiply his fine qualities and set them all over him like prickles 
 on a burr, destined to hold you while they irritate. Multi- 
 tudes are bold, but who, bethink you, stands forth so finely 
 fortunate ? He had a star, and no book so lucky as to coax him 
 for a stroll into its pages could thenceforth exist without him. 
 He is the living exponent of that belief lying warm at the hearts 
 of all, and carefully concealed, lest we be deposed from our 
 middle-aged eminence, that youth, after all, is the thing; and 
 even its errors turn to the general good. 
 
 Long John Silver is real as was Beelzebub to a mediaeval 
 mind, and every Luther of us is ready to cast the first ink-bottle. 
 David Balfour, that pawky chiel, had more than a touch of 
 **the shorter catechist"; a clumsy chivalry and little humor, 
 poor laddie ! and I fear much that after the sad example of 
 that gallant Barbara Grant, we flout him while we love. How 
 innocently does he lay his harmless foibles bare ! Never was 
 autobiography so truly self-betrayal. Said the Lord Advocate, 
 **I have a respect for you, Mr. David, mingled with awe." 
 So have we all ! 
 
 But Alan Breck ! here something leaps in and stays the pen, 
 lest it run to justice and not all to praise. The very glance of 
 him wins the heart at a bound ; — 
 
 **His eyes were unusually light, and had a kind of dancing 
 madness in them, that was both engaging and charming." 
 
 Most vain, most brave, the henchman of that dancing devil in 
 the eye, a boaster of his prowess, a braggart over his left-handed 
 birth, simple as a child in friendship, loyal as a dog, honest, 
 like all true artists, when it came to the supremacy of the pipes ; 
 best of all, inspired singer of The Song of the Sword of Alan. 
 Curiously complex, yet obviously direct, a product of the Scottish 
 nature and the romance-breeding time, who shall find his equal ? 
 Who is not still aggrieved that he enters so charily into the later 
 fortunes of David Balfour ? 
 38 
 
Enumeration tires over the illuminated list of this warm, 
 thronging company. Sea-captains, diverse in headstrong force, 
 and often enough diverse in crime ; Jim Pinkerton, crass 
 product of no age but ours, soldier of financial fortune, abor- 
 tive millionaire, and yet, spite of his blatant, open-mouthed 
 inadequacy, invincibly attractive ; Loudon Dodd's grand- 
 father, that mossy grasshopper piping from among the 
 tombs ; Mr. Whish, the most frightful inorganic embodiment 
 of vice, ignorance and blasphemy ever conceived by mind of 
 man ; and Attwater, truly religious, truly fanatical, and cruel as 
 death, because he dared relegate to himself the attribute of Al- 
 mighty God, and judge where judgment faileth. There you 
 have them in little, a sample of the king's gallery. 
 
 In one book only does the actual development of character and 
 motive outstrip the movement of plot ; that dark drama of fra- 
 ternal feud. The Master of Ballantrae. Treasure Island holds 
 the mind entranced like the Ancient Mariner's glittering eye. 
 Kidnapped exhilarates with adventure so pure that there's not a 
 headache in a cask of it ; but The Master is informed by a hu- 
 man, ethical value to which they never aspire. The dramatis 
 perso?ic:s might almost be cut down to three, the two brothers and 
 the canny, stupid, brave, cowardly old house-dog of a steward, 
 who tells the tale and depicts himself so excellently in the tell- 
 ing. My lady, though prime motive in the machinery, is none 
 so vivid as the men she sways. A thrilling reality touches the 
 the story, in part because it is given out of the mouth of more 
 than one witness, and carefully edited by foot-notes (a device al- 
 ways calculated to give a ring of authenticity), but on higher 
 grounds through the Nemesis of character, growing and swelling 
 into the Nemesis of act. 
 
 It is impossible to weigh the book without remembering one 
 stern stricture of Stevenson's in his essay on Burns; approval of 
 the fiat that a virtuous act is not necessarily followed by a for- 
 tunate result. The universe is not to be set right by a half-hour's 
 soldering. Burns, in his palsied striving after some compensat- 
 ing good for the evil he sowed and tended, married the 
 woman he had wronged ; yet the evil kept on flourishing until it 
 choked his very breath. So in The Master a love of strict, ap- 
 parent justice rebels that the brother who had suffered all things 
 at the hands of his evil genius, until his reason was actually 
 shaken, should perish in the same disaster that overwhelmed the 
 devil who set him beside himself, and was morally responsible for 
 
 39 
 
his deeds. But Stevenson knows how truly poetic justice is the 
 justice of the study, not of God. Certain deeds bring about 
 certain mathematical results; though you be thrown thither, you 
 shall not enter fraternal warfare and escape unsmirched. Though 
 Abel may have scratched you into madness with a poison root, 
 yet if you do the act of Cain, you shall surely die. There are 
 deeds born only to end in doom, and though goodness become 
 evil through no responsibility of its own, since it is evil it shall 
 not escape. A house divided against itself shall fall, and even he 
 at whose door the measure of blame lies lightest, shall betake him- 
 self to safety in time, lest his flight be vain. 
 
 The world *' will still be talking" because Stevenson so 
 rigorously excluded women-folk from his tales. Even when he 
 admits them, it is apparently from a species of courtesy, a 
 deference to tradition. One looks to see them humiliatingly 
 conscious that he could have set his scene without their bungling 
 aid. Quite evidently he is a boy who has no mind to play 
 with girls. They are somewhat in the way. He is absorbingly 
 satisfied with games made up of guns and boats, and in such 
 matters girls may not meddle too boldly, lest they unsex them 
 quite. Though love be supremest factor of deeds, he needs it 
 not. He finds dragon-killing sufficiently exhilarating, though 
 Andromeda sit at home, safe at her tambour-frame. But reasons 
 multiply; suggestions grow in clouds. He is too critically wise 
 not to realize that when his puppets do up their hair and put 
 on petticoats, the wires work rustily. The Lady of Ballantrae 
 is pure feminine as Lady Esmond, patient and uncomplaining, 
 but she is an abstract of virtue and not its living body. Joanna 
 Sedley's sole touch of nature lies in that one frank outburst when 
 she repudiates her boy's clothes because they did not fit, and 
 Otto's Princess belongs rather to the romance of fairydom than 
 the courts of this civilized world. Catriona does, at times, promise 
 to show herself a real girl, warmly human when she creeps under 
 your plaidie, and with much heroic mettle in her; but even she's 
 scarce ** remembered on warm and cold days." Only Barbara 
 Grant quite rouses the heart, but she is no more than a gallant lad 
 born for the Forest of Arden or some merry outlawry, *^ chasing 
 the red deer and following the roe." No, it is useless to turn the 
 fact, or mouth it in the telling; from that rich and magic scrip of 
 his, the gods omitted the one little key to the feminine heart. Pos- 
 sibly he fails to emulate Meredith's portraiture, because he lacks 
 Meredith's partisanship. The feminine spirit, fostering, intui- 
 40 
 
tive in sympathy, draws and holds him; he dreams of womanly 
 comradeship, even in wood-solitude, its welcome at his journey's 
 end; but the very complexity of the nature for whose rich dowry 
 he longed, might, when it came to portrayal, have warded away 
 his own too-similar spirit. Praise becomes golden when crown- 
 ing a manly man with the highest attributes among those broadly 
 classified as feminine; as the tenderest woman becomes all the 
 rarer having drunk in manly virtues. When each partakes of the 
 other's best, then are both nearer God's image than any creature 
 yet conceived. Stevenson had all the complexity of make-up 
 ordinarily accorded womankind, her special lustre superadded to 
 his own birthright of courage, honor and truth; and in style, 
 plot, character-drawing, even in formulated religion, he took ref- 
 uge, through the attraction of difference, in the simple and the free. 
 Moreover, woman is not only complex, but she is more artificial 
 than man, more closely fettered by the restraints of traditionary 
 law. More dramatic than he, she not only becomes what nature 
 made her, and what she would fain make herself, but also what 
 man expects her to be. But Stevenson loved to paint souls that 
 live near the heart of things, and who, bad or good, are gov- 
 erned, not by acquired morality but by the great primal springs 
 of action. He had no space for her who veers and tacks with 
 wandering breezes; his ship must sail straight on under the 
 sweeping wind of elemental passion though to the gulf beneath. 
 
 Who ever threw his gold about so lavishly, or cast his spell 
 abroad and gilded all he touched ? Was there ever such errant 
 flitting from wood to vale, over the fence and back again ? 
 Sometimes, when the eye roves over the entire field of his achieve- 
 ment, his art seems tentative, the quicksilver brain not yet de- 
 cided whither to run, the hand unfettered by devotion to one 
 form. Heaven-tongued essayist, poet and playwright, the prodi- 
 gal soul yet spent itself most lavishly in many-hued romance. 
 And what a range is there ! For this man, who knew the road 
 to wild adventure, could set down the pure unreality of that syl- 
 van visioning, Prince Otto; the haunting prose idyl. Will o' the 
 Mill; those modern floutings of probability. The New Arabian 
 Nights, with their excellent hocus-pocus; the farcical joking of 
 The Wrong Box; the ethical beauty of Markheim; the crystal- 
 lized horror of Thrawn Janet, and to step outside romance, the 
 terse, humane appeal in the Footnote to History, and the vitriol 
 etching of the letter to the Reverend Doctor Hyde. The Letter 
 has a double value. In that swift rebuking, he takes up arms 
 
 41 
 
for another and in the act again reveals himself. His justice 
 spits a scornful concession, yet is it justice still. Father 
 Damien was dirty; he owns it. But, oh, sacred ministry of 
 love ! to-day, " there is not a clean cup or towel in the Bishop- 
 Home, but dirty Damien washed it." These pages, overrun by 
 the fire of scorching justice, still are burning, and will burn ; they 
 only need one commentary, — Stevenson's own conclusion to 
 his interpretation of Christ's teaching to accept and pardon all: 
 ''But when another's face is buffeted, perhaps a little of the lion 
 will become us best." And still remains the delicate, sweetly- 
 whimsical Travels with a Donkey, and that treasury of English, 
 Across the Plains, full of life and light and color, and sternly 
 uncomplaining as a soldier's journal. Verily, all art is one, the 
 service of truth and beauty; and the man imbued with her great 
 spirit shall penetrate her many gates. 
 
 According to Stevenson's own confession, the Brownies who 
 set his scene and acted the dramas he afterwards elaborated 
 for print, were absolutely unmoral, and he was obliged to put in 
 the morality, "such as it is." But very little is put in, and 
 that of the simplest sort ; black and white, not grays. Let it be 
 understood that he who reads the novels without reference to 
 the essays and descriptive prose does not know the temper of 
 Stevenson, the man, and will be apt to call him a cool-blooded 
 pagan, not sneering at evil, but holding to a deadly indifference. 
 But read with such fine commentary, you see him what he 
 is, the impartial chronicler, looking with large clear gaze on all 
 the creatures God has made, selecting such as fit his scene, and 
 assembling them there, neither extenuating nor setting down 
 aught in malice. Such as they are, they are. It is his business 
 to write novels, not sermons. Only if you be of those who 
 find their sermons on the roadway of life, you may read them 
 here, though they shall neither be intoned for yo.u nor blazoned 
 upon the wall. No man save Thomas Hardy equals him in this 
 candid photography, and with Hardy it is impossible not to 
 suspect at times the cynic smile. Stevenson remains ever the 
 serious, faithful scribe, the man who shrinks from judgment and 
 walks in compassion. 
 
 Now, in the hidden ways of life, the moods and longings of 
 that inner sanctuary where the soul sitteth alone, what manner 
 of man was this who lived among us, the uncomplaining target 
 of fate, and joy's chief ministrant .? First of all, a gypsy, with 
 errant longings all keyed to the tune of "Over the Hills and Far 
 
 42 
 
Away,'* a heart fixed upon the pleasures of the road. A tree 
 sets him tingling with delight, and he is never done describing a 
 river. The living and growing are brothers of one birth with 
 him, and breathing their air, he waxes strong and mounts into 
 ampler regions of being. A wood he finds entrancing ; he 
 adores its dignified seclusion, its way of seeking the heart of life 
 through its rich existence of boughs in the air we never inhabit, 
 and the untracked wandering of the roots. Bounded in place, 
 yet free in twig and filament, drinking from a hundred springs 
 never tapped by man, a tree is strangely akin to him, for he, 
 too, felt the check of mortality, and yet grew into the light 
 and spread his leafage there. But perhaps running water pleased 
 him best, with its vital relations to a diversified life, its dreamy 
 wanderings and hurrying plunge into the strange salt sea. His 
 delight was in praising the Oise, whether, in the Golden Valley, 
 it fed fat pasture-lands where kine browsed and patient, dull 
 little donkeys came to lip the happy flood; or where, nearer the 
 sea, it caught at the banks and dragged them down with swirling 
 might, and then (grown greater) forgot the old familiar idyl 
 upon its shores, and gave itself up to the giant egotism of trade. 
 At the start, in that canoeing progress, he was like a merry spirit 
 visited by those clear-voiced birds, the wandering bells, by 
 wood-scents and good earth breezes; at its close, he paddled 
 mechanically, alive only to sense, with all the thinking facul- 
 ties in abeyance. He was very near the heart of being, near as 
 an oak tree or a springing fern, and with little trouble, he could 
 speed him there again; for one free hour inspires him with 
 ecstasy, and a night out of doors, under the hollow heaven, re- 
 constructs his youth. Urged thus by gypsy longings, he is fired 
 with a perpetual discontent, not because of life itself, but life as 
 we have agreed to make it. Our asinine conventions turn him 
 sick, but his medicine is the sort that all may borrow; give him 
 
 " — A Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough, 
 A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse— " 
 
 **a winding road, and three hours' march to dinner," and he 
 asks no odds of emperors. And such choosing bespeaks, louder 
 than trump can tell, his true sanity of soul. Out-door air re- 
 vivifies like the water of life, and to know it is to take hold on 
 truth; without it, men are become — but let Stevenson phrase it: 
 ** Without fresh air, you only require a bad heart, and a remark- 
 able command of the Queen's English to become such another 
 
 43 
 
as Dean Swift; a kind of leering, human goat, leaping and wag- 
 ging your scut on mountains of offence." 
 
 The essays, beyond all consideration of their jewelled phras- 
 ing, belong not so truly to his art as to his gospel of deeds. 
 Every man's life is a daily Credo'^ with the author, every word. 
 Here was one whose foes lived within his very citadel, his mortal 
 habitation a ramshackle palace where destroying winds swept ever, 
 unvisited by airs of calm. Yet the indomitable spirit dwelt 
 there like some doomed Ravenswood, sworn to keep his former 
 state; or as a princely soul vowed, since death must come, to 
 await him serene and royal as the invading horde found the 
 Roman Fathers, dressed in their robes of price and throned on 
 ivory chairs. Did ever man shut in so frail a tenement so 
 bravely simulate the deeds of health ? This' was a creature 
 fitted for joy, and since Joy fled him, save at those rare moments 
 when he slept beneath the trees and made his tent the open sky, 
 he was fain to take that sterner mistress to his arms, and wed 
 himself to Courage. We believe too little now in the miracle of 
 soul-sufficiency; we deify the flesh, and coming into life ill- 
 equipped, we whimper when we do not curse. But for him, 
 necessity was laid upon him; he came hither to dominate, 
 though in the midst of carnage. 
 
 It is easy to conclude that one other strong soul, besides the 
 woman who loved him, stood by him, soldierlike, and heartened 
 him for war. What he owed the half-dozen friends whose 
 names are familiar on his tongue, as well as what he gave them, 
 w^e can partly guess; but something deeper clings about the man 
 who, from the circle of ghastly dreams and red experiences, 
 could formulate the greatest pagan cry of modern years: 
 
 '* Out of the night that covers me. 
 Black as the pit from pole to pole 
 I thank whatever gods may be 
 For my unconquerable soul." 
 
 We know, of inmost necessity, that such a soul, in Steven- 
 son's long and losing battle of the flesh, must have been one 
 with him in the valor pledged to withstand the shock and onset 
 of the day. 
 
 What did Stevenson believe? So simple a system of morals was 
 never more simply set forth. To owe no man anything, paying 
 scot as you go; to consider your neighbor's happiness; to live cleanly 
 and honest; to do no scamp work; to sing loud at your task, and 
 
 44 
 
moan, if you must, under cover; and above all, to obey : the creed of 
 the soldier and the gentleman. To him, life was evidently, in 
 the noblest sense, a great game of make-believe, the heroic 
 blazonry of the captain who stands unblenching on the bridge, 
 knowing the fire smoulders below, and inwardly sworn to ward 
 off panic till the hour of help. It is impossible to believe that 
 a creature so exquisitely organized as Robert Louis Stevenson was 
 not sore beset by the nightmare horrors of life; the shapeless 
 fears that rise at our side and clutch at us with impotent though 
 terrifying hands. But with knapsack on his back, he marched 
 with jocund step straight through this shadowy valley, his eyes 
 ever seeking, though no star lit up the dark, his purpose fixed in 
 noble acquiescence on that unseen goal whither we all are thrust 
 although we choose it not. Some of us go stumbling, pushed 
 neck and crop into the unknown; he walked erect and proud, 
 singing the song of joyance as he strode. In the light of such 
 persistent cheer, Pulvis et Umbra, the one dark confession of 
 his life, girds us anew for the fray. For through its very gloom, 
 he proves himself a man like as we are, a man who shrank and 
 then trod firmer yet. No such picture exists of world-making 
 and destruction, of the things that breed and die, of hand to 
 hand conflict doomed always to end in dissolution. The strange- 
 ness of it all, and stranger still that man should strive! That he 
 should live even spasmodically for others, should struggle to be 
 cleanly, make laws, forego delight! Seen in despairing mood, 
 the whole scheme becomes a hideous, swarming phantasm of life, 
 breaking every instant into rotting death. Then having made 
 that most tragic avowal, he can add: 
 
 ** Let it be enough for faith that the whole creation groans in 
 mortal frailty, strives witK unconquerable constancy; surely not all 
 in vain.'''* 
 
 It is a shallow hopefulness that would escape the vision of 
 decay. **If life be hard for such resolute and pious spirits, it 
 is harder still for us, had we the wit to understand it." But 
 though we join the cry of lamentation, we must in honor swell 
 the response of hope. That Stevenson could hold up his head 
 and troll his careless ditties to the sun, after that Miserere of the 
 soul, opens the mind like a flower to the possibilities of 
 human regnancy. One man has looked hell in the face and 
 stayed undaunted. One man has peered over the gulf where 
 suns are swinging and unmade stars light up the dusk, and yet 
 retained the happy sanity of our common life. He returned 
 
 45 
 
from his Tartarean journey lifting to the unseen heaven the great, 
 glad cry of ultimate obedience. Therefore will we not despair, 
 nor wish one thorn the less had sprung before his feet. We are 
 the stronger for his pain; his long conflict helps to make our 
 calm. For very shame, we dare not skulk nor loiter now; and 
 whither Stevenson has gone, there do we in our poor, halting 
 fashion seek the way. 
 
 POSTLUDE 
 
 WHEN FROM THE VISTA OF THE BOOK I SHRINK, 
 
 FROM LAUDED PENS THAT EARN IGNOBLE WAGE 
 
 BEGETTING NOTHING JOYOUS, NOTHING SAGE, 
 
 NOR KEEP WITH SHAKESPEARE' S USE ONE GOLDEN LINK; 
 
 WHEN HEAVILY MY SANGUINE SPIRITS SINK 
 
 TO READ TOO PLAIN ON EACH IMPOSTOR PAGE 
 
 ONLY OF KINGS THE BROKEN LINEAGE, 
 
 WELL FOR MY PEACE IF THEN ON THEE I THINK, 
 
 LOUIS, OUR PRIEST OF LETTERS AND OUR KNIGHT 
 
 WITH WHOSE FAMILIAR BALDRIC HOPE IS GIRT, 
 
 FROM WHOSE YOUNG HANDS SHE BEARS THE GRAIL AWAY: 
 
 ALL GLAD, ALL GREAt! TRUER BECAUSE THOU WERT 
 
 I AM AND MUST BE, AND IN THY KNOWN LIGHT 
 
 GO DOWN TO DUST, CONTENT WITH THIS MY DAY. 
 
 Stcut luna pcrfecta in aeternum et testis in coelo fiOelie. 
 
 $1) $y 
 
 Two hundred and fifty copies of this book have been printed 
 during May 1895 at the Heintzemann Press Boston 
 46 
 
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 THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. THE PENALTY 
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