Robert Louis Stevenson

I.

THE term fin de siècle has come to be one of unmitigated reproach. Whatsoever things are weary, whatsoever things are corrupt, whatsoever things are (or used to be) unmentionable in polite society, are all opprobriously grouped under these three hard - working words. With but four more New Year’s Days in the nineteenth century for robust resolutions, four happy new years for a decadent keeping of the same, the anxious question rises whether the hour that begins a hundred new years will mark a stage of progress or only an imaginary line. Will the decadents stop decaying, and the symbolists devise a healthier code of signals demanded by a healthier art ? Will there be all sorts of dewy beginnings in literature, and will Paris, ever equal to the occasion, produce some matutinal phrase that shall drive out this hateful vesper term of ennui and disease ?

Whatever the event, men may be sure that when the glass has been turned, the scythe whetted, and the joy-bells rung, they will still find time for many backward glances at the hundred years behind them. And they will note the fact that although prose romance in English died with Scott long before the sand was half run out, it was born again, but in less vigor, with Stevenson, another man of his race, while the centuryglass yet lacked twenty years of turning. It will be recorded that while the historian of Wessex celebrated the three Fates until people shuddered to see the thread both spun and cut, and a strong young Occidental in the East took pains to show that men’s motives are not always better than those which stir the jungle, this northern teller of tales, who shared his empire with them, took upon himself the different and truly romantic task of giving the world pleasure unmixed with pain. And it will likewise be observed, I think, with the wisdom which, I seem to hear the reader say, sits so easily upon critics, whether for prophecy or for retrospect, that Stevenson not only quickened an admirable art, but also founded a school of more and less unsuccessful imitators of himself.

Judgment of Mr. Stevenson in his varied activity must be left to aube de siècle judges. He will take the place proper to him without our help ; it may be, without theirs. Of obituary lament there has been already enough and to spare ; but the moment admits, perhaps, now that the multitude who mourn him have recovered somewhat from the sorrow and confusion brought by his death to all who care for letters, a brief lingering over a few of those qualities which one reader, at least, has found most salient. That Stevenson was gay and resolute enough to found a school of romance in the midst of opposing tendencies is, of course, the chief quality of all. He loves the past for the courageous picture of it which survives. He blows his wild war-note, unfurls his banner to the breeze of long ago, and goes forth always to the motto, “ Esperance and set on.” This watchword, indeed, might be set above essay as well as story, travels and verse as well as essay, for in almost all the extraordinary variety of his writing Robert Louis Stevenson is the consistent preacher of courage and cheer. The writer’s own brave and most pathetic life was, as the world knows, a consistent practicing of what he preached. In most of his published words, optimism is at, the height of the Selkirk grace, or of Happy Thought in A Child’s Garden of Verses : —

And never, even in A Christmas Sermon or Pulvis et Umbra, does he decline farther into the vale of pessimism than the stage once dubbed meliorism by a great novelist whom he did not love. It is indubitably a help to this philosophy that arrival and success are not among its dreams. The beckoning road and the roadside inn are ever better with Stevenson than the end of the passage. Pleasure lies in running, not in reaching the goal; and hunger is an infinitely sweeter thing than satiety. “ A man’s reach “ — I have wondered that be nowhere quotes a line with which he everywhere agrees — “ a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven

II.

Next in importance, perhaps, to the cardinal trait of Mr. Stevenson’s career, that he was a romantic in an age of realism, come the facts that he was a Scotchman, born within the frown of Edinburgh Castle, and that his father and grandfather were engineers to the Board of Northern Lights. This sounds like a business connection with the Aurora Borealis, but it means merely that the lives of the Stevensons had the relish both of salvation and of adventure, because they were the builders of Skerryvore, the Bell Rock, and other great sea-lights along the northern coast of Britain. Much of the best writing of the author of David Balfour — can any one forget the dedication of that book ? — thrills and tingles with the feeling of race and native land. I have in mind at this moment The Foreigner at Home, a page or two of The Silverado Squatters, and portions of the paper entitled The Manse, ending with the triumphant picture of ascent from the writer, through engineers, Picts, and what-not clans and tribes, to Probably Arboreal chattering in the top of the family tree. Less often, yet again and again, both in verse and in prose, does Stevenson dwell proudly upon the exploits and the hardy lives of his forbears, and mourn the degeneracy in bodily frame and strength of their hearth-keeping descendant. His whole feeling about all this is in some enchanting lines written at Bournemouth, in a house named after the chief memorial of his family : —

It never occurred to him that he was the brightest of all the lamps they lit, but many men, even of the not inhuman, would be content to see Skerry vore itself quenched in the ocean, if by that extinction the light might shine again on Pala mountain.

Country, then, and race — this latter in the specific sense of family, for Scotia is a land of more than one race, of two languages and many dialects — count to a degree that can scarcely be exaggerated in this talent which had its training within view of Arthur’s Seat; in the rainy and red-lighted streets of Edinburgh, where “ 2d coloured ” was always to be had without the siller ; and in the rough but bracing school of her ancient democratic university. Of dialect, to be sure, Stevenson is quite free, save when he uses it for his pleasure. Sir Walter, as may be seen with added clearness, now that his noble journal has been issued without Lockhart’s revision, was as often hindered as helped by certain auxiliaries which to this day trouble dear Mrs. Oliphant, and have once again proved their rebellious power against the brither Scots who have been commemorating poor Stevenson in print. But Stevenson’s own pages, with the exception of a single would which I seem to remember in Prince Otto, but dare say I am mistaken about, and perhaps a will out of place here and there, together with one or two other slight offenses in his earlier writings, — Stevenson’s own belles pages are vacant of what the lexicographers hissingly call Scotticisms.

Not so with turns of thought and the Scottish dialect of the mind. In this he is eloquent, and of it he is involuntarily prodigal. Mr. Henry James has said, in words which none may hope to better, that Mr. Stevenson is a Scotchman of the world. So, indeed, he is; and so, without doubt, was the man as well as the writer. But this Bohemian, this gypsy, this cosmopolite, had, after all his travels, — thus I have been told by one who knew him, — a slight burr remaining in his speech. And he has a much stronger Doric accent of the mind. England seems to him in many ways an alien land, and The Foreigner at Home is a resonant statement of differences that lie at the very root of things between the sister kingdoms. The Scot, traveling southward from his gray hills and rocks and mists, marvels — however much he may have read in books — at the rich fields, the quiet rivers, the stolid and sodden peasant, the windmills, and the chimes of bells. The accent of the people sounds pertly in his ear, just as Davie Balfour “ was amazed at the clipping tones and the odd sing-song ” of “ the right English speech ; ” and to his eye, familiar with thick-walled houses built of stone, the thin, flat-chested edifices of England seem no more than “ rickles ” of brick. The northerner may even be a householder in the south, and his door-key he burnished from long use ; but still “ the house is no his ain house, he kens by the biggin’ o’t.”

If these differences are radical to the Scot in what meets his eye, still deeper do they go in the things of the spirit. English boys seem to Mr. Stevenson cleaner in mind and body than Scotch boys, and, as we say, younger for their age. He finds them less imaginative, and at once less rough and less tender. And the grown-up John Bull impresses his expansive neighbor with “ the grand, treelike self-sufficiency of his demeanor.”

The systems of law of these two peoples differ widely, as the least forensic of us knew already from The Heart of Midlothian and the trial of Effie Deans. To our author’s thinking the ways of their religion part yet more sharply, for, says he, — a little whimsically, I cheerfully admit, — “ about the very cradle of the Scot there goes a hum of metaphysical divinity, and the whole of two divergent systems is summed up, not merely speciously, in the two first questions of the rival catechisms ; the English tritely inquiring, ‘ What is your name?’ the Scottish striking at the very roots of life with, ‘ What is the chief end of man ? ’ and answering nobly, if obscurely, ‘ To glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.’ ”

Thus far, and in many another delectable passage, the conscious Caledonian. But Mr. Stevenson is not least attractive when he is of his nation without knowing, or at least without remembering it; when not only, cosmic Scot though he be, he keeps the color of his nativity, but also, highly secularized Calvinist though he as surely is, he unwittingly suggests the bleak pulpit of the northern kingdom. In Father Damien, an Open Letter, in the Samoan Footnote to History, none but the blind can fail to see a kind of religious heat of argument ; and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, approached at the angle not of art, but of ethics, is the fascinating, hideous result of generations of pondering over the eternal problem of predestination and free will. In the keen pursuit of the first paper on Talk and Talkers there is a charming zeal for conviction, and I seem to see the hand of Calvin, working obscurely, it is true, in Stevenson’s conduct of the case of womankind against Robert Burns. Nor must the reader think me fanciful if I maintain that in Crabbed Age and Youth, of all compositions in the world, — it is to be found in the golden book Virginibus Puerisque, — there is once and again a canny, hard-headed weighing of the advantages and claims of the two estates of life that brings us gayly (yet still brings us) within the shadow of St. Giles. But atavism fails at the end. The humanized preacher reaches no conclusion, and the whole lively prelection is left poised in the air.

If zest in discussion, not to say argument, is a frequent trait of Stevenson’s countrymen, why then a good amount of buckram is equally apparent in their moral texture. It makes them stiff in judgment, and from this rigidity Stevenson himself was by no means exempt. No one, in these days, except a Scotchman or a New Englander, we must believe, could be so exquisite an artist and have at the same time so large a fund of ethical attention. The incongruity of the union in Stevenson, the like and unlike incongruity of Hawthorne, are to be explained, in the slight and tentative degree to which such mysteries can ever be shown, by the long persistence of the straiter sort of Puritanism in the two countries. Some one exclaims that I am mistaken, that Stevenson is no Puritan. Let me hasten to add that Stevenson is usually un-Scotch in his standards, — although he has often expressed his admiration for frugality, and calls it somewhere the artist’s armor, — but that in stiff adherence to his standards he is valiantly Puritan and Scotch. Of himself he required much ; the sum of his moral impost upon others appears to be that they should be brave, honest, cheerful, kind, and that, without seeking their own happiness, they should strive to bring happiness to their fellow-men. Not the credo of the unco’ guid, this, in Scotland or anywhere else; but it is Stevenson’s wherever he is. And the Scotchman of the world, the gay Puritan, insists upon the few articles of his belief when he is openly preaching, as in A Christmas Sermon ; or covertly preaching, as in Old Mortality ; or sketching and traveling, as with a donkey. He insists implicitly, even in his stories, where the artist curbs and bits the accompanying moralist ; but explicitly enough throughout those compositions in which the writer himself plays all the speaking parts. Burns, John Knox, the Scotchman on board the emigrant ship, the peasant in the Cévennes, François Villon, or the persons whom Stevenson meets voyaging, Cæsar-like, among the Belgæ, — one and all, gentle and simple, priest and peasant, they are rigidly tried (but always according to their lights) by the same humane standard.

Pray let no one take me to mean that this beguiling writer is always preaching, or that most of his intermittent and ever welcome preachings are not in fashion so blithe as to recommend themselves like song. But I, for my part, love his sympathies still better than his tenets. And it is through Stevenson’s knowledge of his country and his sympathy with its people — a quality in him which has all the fervor of a clan, all the geniality of a larger world — that his Scottish tales are his best. Treasure Island, for its twenty-one deaths, its buccaneers and stockade, its one most hideous murder, and, above all, for its “ seafaring man with one leg,” I admire with my brain as an inimitably clever imitation of eminent and well-known models. The style is a little miracle of the direct and the appropriate, and as for the conduct of the fable, that might be taken as a breathing example of the Athenian’s formula for oratory, — “ Action, action, action.” But in Kidnapped — alas for the inefficient title ! — the imitator becomes himself a model; we step at once into an air which, if not more lively, is more alive and more authentic, and the characters, Alan and David, of course, more than any, are felt to be less symbolical and more individual. In their long flight together, the wind seems to turn the pages of that swift record, and the smell of the heather comes with it. The spirit of the nation is dominant. The young Stuart and his forlorn hope are ever present by suggestion, though never in actuality ; and one of the most romantic passages in all history is thus a background, or rather a running accompaniment, to this story of Highlander and Lowlander. Alan Breck Stewart, who “ bore a king’s name,” is delineated with much spirit, and — I dare to say so — runs some of Scott’s romantico - comic characters hard. But the portrait of David Balfour, ironically drawn, yet sympathetically colored, is a service which no man could render another if the Tweed divided them. “ Mr. Balfour,” said Cluny in the “ cage,”“ I think you are too nice and covenanting, but for all that you have the spirit of a very pretty gentleman.” So he has, but so darkened with the covenant that it is a triumph to have made the more generous essence shine through. If Alan and Davie live, surely it will be because they are not only individual, but typical; and — the rule of character works both ways — because not only are they of the Highlands and the Lowlands, Jacobite and Whig, but also are in their own persons David Balfour and Alan Breck Stewart.

If the reader be not weary of persons and things Scotch,—and if he be, even the cunning of Stevenson’s right hand cannot entertain him, — I should like to note, as we pass, that as the best of the fiction is of that country, so likewise some of the shrewdest and most piquant things in the essays are born to the same native manner. Memories and Portraits, by common consent the best in toto of the three volumes, is by subject four fifths Scotch; Child’s Play, in Virginibus Puerisque, is in all its origin Scotch ; Scotch also in more than that sense the ingenious and eloquent plea for romance, so finely entitled The Lantern Bearers. Dost remember the minister and the dying gravedigger in Old Mortality ? “ The gravedigger heard him out; then he raised himself upon one elbow, and with the other hand pointed through the window to the scene of his lifelong labors. ‘ Doctor,’ he said, ‘ I ha’e laid three liunner and fowerscore in that kirkyaird; an it had been His wull,’ indicating Heaven, ‘ I would ha’e likit weel to ha’e made out the fower liunner.’ ” Or the Old Scotch Gardener? He would thank you gravely if you praised one of his plants, “ all credit in the matter falling to him. If, on the other hand, you called his attention to some back-going vegetable, he would quote Scripture: ’Paul may plant and Apollos may water ; ’ all blame being left to Providence, on the score of deficient rain or untimely frosts.”

Of Scotland and the north, also, was Mr. Hunter,—but we must leave this too captivating part of our theme with only a final illustration, from The Silverado Squatters, of how one true-born Scotchman feels when he meets another in foreign lands. The sentiment lifts the young writer not so much into maturity of style, for that was surprisingly his already, as into that stronger and fuller tide of feeling which one encounters in general only in Stevenson’s later writing. The twain, says he, may be rivals, almost foreigners, at home ; but when they meet abroad, they are joined at once by “ some ready-made affection.”

“ It is not race. Look at us. One is Norse, one Celtic, and another Saxon. It is not community of tongue. We have it not among ourselves; and we have it almost to perfection with English or Irish or American. It is no tie of faith, for we detest each other’s errors. And yet somewhere, deep down in the heart of each one of us, something yearns for the old land and the old kindly people.

“ Of all mysteries of the human heart, this is perhaps the most inscrutable. There is no special loveliness in that gray country, with its rainy, sea-beat archipelago; its fields of dark mountains ; its unsightly places, black with coal; its treeless, sour, unfriendly looking corn-lands; its quaint, gray, castled city, where the Hells clash of a Sunday, and the wind squalls, and the salt showers fly and beat. I do not even know if I desire to live there; but let me hear, in some far land, a kindred voice sing out, ‘ Oh, why left I my hame ? ’ and it seems at once as if no beauty under the kind heavens, and no society of the wise and good, can repay me for my absence from my country. And though, I think, I would rather die elsewhere, yet in my heart of hearts I long to be buried among good Scots clods. I will say it fairly, it grows on me with every year: there are no stars so fair as Edinburgh street lamps. When I forget thee, auld Reekie, may my right hand forget its cunning!

“ The happiest lot on earth is to be born a Scotchman. You must pay for it in many ways, as for all other advantages on earth. You have to learn the paraphrases and the shorter catechism ; you generally take to drink ; your youth, as far as I can find out, is a time of louder war against society, of more outcry and tears and turmoil, than if you had been born, for instance, in England. But somehow life is warmer and closer; the hearth burns more redly ; the lights of home shine softer on the rainy street; the very names, endeared in verse and music, cling nearer round our hearts. An Englishman may meet an Englishman to-morrow upon Chimborazo, and neither of them care ; but when the Scotch wine-grower told me of Mons Meg, it was like magic.

And, Highland and Lowland, all our hearts are Scotch.”

Thus saith every right native of a hill-country, and with yet more heart if it chance to be a north-country and a sea-country as well.

III.

That Mr. Stevenson is a sworn romantic, and that he is so much a Scot as to keep a strong flavor of the wilding, in spite of each exotic graft, are truths no less conspicuous than that he is an exquisite and a secure artist in prose narrative, in verse, the essay, and the sketch. So perfectly, indeed, does he write that the Philistines—and not the mere bourgeois citizens of the country, but the first families of Philistia — are often heard to accuse him of having naught to say. To them, it is more than probable, he has nothing at all to say, unless they first master certain remarks once made by Mr. Joseph Addison on the subject of Literary Taste. But to the minds of men who have a humble and hearty admiration for good writing, Stevenson’s tales of adventure gain much from his care about form ; and his kind and sagacious thoughts gain very much indeed from the “ continual slight novelty ” of his style. This loved and lost story-teller of ours could no more content himself with the construction used by Dumas in his gay and ragged volumes than with the disposition and English of the scene in Guy Mannering which jars on him like a false note in music or color. Yet he had read Le Vicomte de Bragelonne five times, and hoped — let us trust the hope was realized — to read it once again before he died. And the jarring scene — which happens, by the way, to have been that of Harry Bertram’s landing at Ellangowan— he respects as being in general “ a model instance of the romantic method.” The Meredith jargon Mr. Stevenson would no more think of putting into the mouths of his own people than he would that uttered by the purely symbolic young men and maidens whom Scott fobs off upon us as heroes and heroines. Mr. Meredith is nevertheless the breath of life to him, and Sir Walter “ out and away the king of the romantics.”

In these references to Stevenson’s art and the frequent artlessness of Scott and Dumas, there is no slightest intention of matching him with them. He would not, if he could, have written like them ; he could not, if he would, have imagined and invented and swung the whole thing along as they did. They, with all their faults, are great romantics: he, with all his gifts and graces, is a little romantic ; and the many well-meaning persons who range him persistently with Scott do him nothing but disservice. The appearance of Meg Merrilies to Godfrey Bertram, the abdication of Queen Mary at Lochleven, the installation of the abbot of Kennaquhair, the appeal of Jeanie Deans for Effie, a certain scene in Old Mortality, — the play and stretch and headlong vigor of sheer improvisation that made all these possible, and easily possible, to Scott, are “ out of the star ” of the author of Kidnapped and David Balfour. Nor, in writing, do I forget Alan and Davie beside the stream, or the bewitching scenes of the windmills in Holland, or the duel of the two brothers outside the distracted house of Durrisdeer, when all was so still that the flame of the candles went up straight and steady into the night. But Sir Walter’s books seem to me like a large symphony which has many discords; Mr. Stevenson’s, like a discreet yet moving theme, perfectly played on fewer instruments. Perhaps we are hasty, the many of us who hold this opinion together. If Scott had died at the age when Stevenson was taken from us, the world would have lacked the Waverley novels ; if a like fate had overtaken Dickens, we should not have had A Tale of Two Cities; and under a similar stroke, Goldsmith could not have written Retaliation, or tasted the bittersweet first night of She Stoops to Conquer. At the age of forty-four Mr. Thomas Hardy had probably not dreamed of Tess of the D’Urbervilles. But what a man has already done at forty year is likely, I am afraid, to be a gauge as well as a promise of what he will do in the future; and from Stevenson we were entitled to expect perfect form and continued variety of subject, rather than a measurable dynamic gain.

Stevenson himself, it would appear, clearly saw the limits within which his talent would best exhibit itself. He never, for a good example, attempted the historical novel, so favorite a field with most romancers. Louis Onze, Louis Treize, Anne of Austria, Mary Queen of Scots, Cardinal Richelieu, Oliver Cromwell, Charles the Second, are a very few of the notables and royalties that figure on those vast, gorgeous tapestries into which Scott and Dumas strove to work the pattern and color of past ages. And men of our own contemporary moment, men whose gifts bear not an instant of comparison with his, have lightly rushed in where Stevenson has feared (or at least refused) to tread. Culloden deepens the gloom of The Master of Ballantrae, and, as I have tried to say, Kidnapped owes even more to the ill-starred family. But whereas Scott’s way was to light the ancient palace again, and in Waverley to show Charles Edward keeping an hour’s court at Holyrood, — or, in that fine apocryphal scene of Redgauntlet, to let us see him bid the Scottish gentlemen good-by forever, — Stevenson’s quite opposite method is to present the young Pretender only by vicar or deputy. Our dear friend Alan, the sons of Rob Roy, and Prestongrange are scarcely of the great persons of history ; but they are more “ historical characters ” than any others I can now recall in Stevenson. And it would have been as much out of him, I think, to essay a portrait in the grand style, of some bygone king or statesman, as to flash such an Aristophanic ray as Caleb Balderstone across a tragedy in the key of The Bride of Lammermoor.

To leave the unseemly task of comparison, I am well aware that there are those who find Mr. Stevenson’s art at fault by times within his chosen province. But The Master of Ballantrae, the chief object of their criticisms, has been dispraised too harshly. The details, to be sure, are ill blended, but each in itself is admirably worked out ; and the failure (or half failure) at last seems to have come through a sheer lack of power to fuse the well-selected elements of the tale. Of details and bits and episodes there is a vast and engaging variety in the writings of this author. That quaint episode, Providence and the Guitar, which must be taken as one of the Stevensonian cruces, reflects within its narrow term all the sweetness and light of Bohemia. That fierce episode, A Story of Francis Villon, shows forth all the bitterness and blackness which may sometimes darken and make sinister the same cheerful land. Pictures are often evoked with a few words, as when the redcoats are seen down the valley from the highplaced rock among the heather; or as when Jekyll discovers the unconscious transformation into Hyde by seeing his hand upon the bedclothes. There has not been such a shudder as that in our literature since Crusoe found the footprint in the sand. Prince Otto, an opéra, bouffe in Dresden china, is another Stevensonian crux, acceptable only to the esoteric and the inner circle; but the going of night and the coming of dawn in the forest of Gerolstein charm the eyes like the sunrise on the Bass Rock.

And so on, indefinitely, these thickcoming memories might be set down ; but it is full time for a word about Stevenson’s style, which is, in the opinion of many, his chief distinction. Several London critics, in the attempt, perhaps, to avenge certain “Bards” upon their “ Reviewers,” have spoken grudgingly of his wonderful skill, because, forsooth, he learned to write before he wrote for publication. The offense was deeper dyed because the young Scot sought aid from France, the ancient ally of Scotland, and scrupled not to avow that his sojourn in Paris and the study of French writers had taught him secrets of technique. Even British critics allow a painter to study pigments before he exhibits a picture, a sculptor to model in clay before he carves the nation’s heroes in marble ; but, in the face of repeated blows, the fine old superstition dies hard, that illregulated impulse is an important element in the “ inspiration ” of an art more subtle than either painting or sculpture. Stevenson chose to reduce this element to a minimum, and to make himself the most faithful of apprentices. He became at last the most impeccable of artists; and although the ardent study of an extraordinary variety of masters did not dull his keen, original gift, — as if, indeed, the right use of even the one talent ever failed to multiply it, — he yet keeps in his most ornate pages the good tradition of the language, the classic note of the best English prose. Stevenson loves and practices the belle phrase, the harmonious sentence; but scarce ever does he descend to the indolent cheville. Never, to the best of my memory, does he make the Wegg-like change, — so often made by Wegg’s creator, that great, imperfect genius, — the change from rhythm to metre. In few, he nicely observes the adjective in Dryden’s saying "that other harmony of prose.”

Stevenson’s prose, then, discourses eloquent music ; and its diversity is no less remarkable than its eloquence. If, like the banker poet, he had elected to read only his own works, he might have found his author always entertaining by frequent recourse from one self to another. He never lacks precision, clearness, proportion, — the classic qualities ; but, outside of these, the variety of his masters helped him to be various. View the distance from the parish of Balweary to the court of Gerolstein, and you will see that never was there a farther cry. The city of Bogdan is not more distant from the hamlet Selifan, or the city of London from the Braes of Balquhidder, than the bland, cool periods of The Suicide Club from the eighteenth-century English (so deftly touched with Scotch) of Kidnapped or the steward Mackellar. And it is incredible to the soul that the same man could have written A Child’s Garden of Verses and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It has been said that Mr. Stevenson’s writing has every virtue save simplicity. To this charge I think we may answer that in the stories his style has almost absolute simplicity, wherever this is consistent with dramatic fitness. In Stevenson’s earlier essay-writing, I own to being reminded now and then of a saving of Alan Breck. Alan had done wonders in the fierce fray of the round-house, but he wanted them acknowledged ; and so he turned to Davie, after the battle, with, “Am I no the bonny fighter?” In Virginibus Puerisque the bonny writer is sometimes conscious of the wonders he has worked.

It is not the least of his achievements that, after his death, he should have received the following appreciation from the Temps newspaper : “ No one better knew how to construct a phrase, a sentence, a chapter; and by this we mean, not the laborious artifice of a pedant, but that native harmony of a born artist who gives to rhythm the part due to it in the symphony of the words.” And in the same article he is called “ the most classic man of letters, in the favorable sense of the word, of contemporary England.” Artist born, — and, alas, artist dead, — this bonny writer may have been too conscious of his wonderful craft in those young works of his, but in the maturer papers the tone is just the right one. In the Memories and Portraits, if not simple, Mr. Stevenson is at least simplex munditiis ; and this phrase of a Roman poet with whom he has some community expresses, I think, one of the best qualities of reflective prose. Mr. Stevenson’s writing is that of a man who, by his own statement, “ lived with words.” He is a true Lavengro. The gypsies, it will not be forgotten, called Borrow Sapenyro, snake-charmer, until he learned their language, when they exalted his title to word-charmer, Lavengro. But Borrow’s magic was “ poor and single business ” in comparison with Stevenson’s. He pipes to his words, and they dance, — a galliard, a coranto, or a jig, according to his will. He changes the tune, and they march as to fife and drum. The music is hushed, and they disperse into the “ solemn troops and sweet societies ” of Pulvis et Umbra and A Christmas Sermon.

Artist as he is, and perhaps because he is an artist, the man shines through all the work of Mr. Stevenson’s hand, and illumines it all. He tells us in beautiful words, yet with a beautiful sincerity, what manner of men and books he loves, and what manner he cannot endure. More than for anything else, I think, he cared for youth ; and the only consolation in his death is that age can never overtake him. This understanding and love of youth brought its exceeding great reward, for to no class or body of readers is Stevenson so dear as to young men. A correspondent of the London Times wrote from Paris that, during his life in France, he was “ always bienvenu ” in the painters’ colony at Barbizon. Bienvenu everywhere, but nowhere the Well Come and the Well Beloved so much as among the younger brothers who are the hope of the world’s family. I had the happiness of speaking of Stevenson, as a writer, to a great company of collegians on the night after his death was heard of in this country ; and since then many of them have talked with me about him, and expressed their feeling of deep personal loss. One generous youth— whose strength and stature let him acknowledge emotions which petty men must hide — said to me across the midnight fire that Stevenson “ made him cry ” more than any other writer. That sums it all up. I might have said it at the beginning, and stopped there. Something does indeed seize us by the throat when we consider the bravery of his pages and the heroic pathos of his life. He worked blithely for years in the imminent face of death, and only when it bent over him and touched him did he still his hand. We thought that in going to Samoa he had come to Elim, and that under its palm-trees and by its wells of water he would find strength to his body and peace to his spirit. But instead of health he gained a mere reprieve from the Fell Sergeant, who happily, at the last, was sudden as well as strict in his arrest.

“ Beat not the bones of the buried: when he breathed, he was a man.”

C. T. Copeland.