at

values the pedestrian virtues. Mackel- Voyage," as the episode of Bazin the
lar, in the "Master of Ballantrae," innkeeper and his wife at La Fère upon
belongs body and soul to the prose the Oise. But love is the perennial
of life; yet his creator has few more surprise, the constant irregularity, and
lovable or intelligible personages to therefore such a passage makes no ex-
show us. Mr. Utterson, in "Dr. ception to Mr. Stevenson's refusal of
Jekyll," is another such, slightly but all actions in which custom is a leading
distinctly drawn; and David Balfour factor. This refusal at once widens
is the impersonation of civic courage. and restricts his range. In the quest
But it is not to be denied that the lean- for situations where men shall be
ings in these books is all in favor of the thrown upon their inward resources,
gipsily inclined ; "there is little value deserted by the guidance of usage, he
set upon the stay-at-homes, unless they is forced to tread continually upon the
are visited with roving desires. Now, confines of the impossible, and scour
under the present conditions of life the world for scenes in unknown cor-
certainly, and probably under all, nine-ners of the Pacific and mysterious pur-
tenths of us are stay-at-homes, and the
stay-at-homes do the business of the
world.

"Jaco

lieus of great towns, where imagination is eternally expectant. It limits, too, his repertory of characters. Briefly Charles Reade (whom alone among speaking, they are adventurers, one and the di minores of the great dead I all: political adventurers in "Prince should put on an equality with Mr. Otto;" seekers of sensation in the Stevenson) had in this respect a wider "Suicide Club;" ingot hunters and grasp on nature. He lacks the younger | pirates in "Treasure Island; writer's distinction of style; but in his bites and fugitives from justice in stories of common life there are things" that come up before the mind as vividly as anything in "Treasure Island." Old Maxley, the miser, in "Hard Cash," is more truly picturesque, to my thinking, than the mad old wrecker in the "Merry Men," despite all his accessories of scenery and weather. Maxley was a drudge, dead, dull, barren, but for the one imaginative passion-the one opening for romance - his avarice. Mr. Stevenson will have nothing to do with drudges, creatures of routine. Whatever is not instinct or impulse says nothing to him. Mackellar, for all his method, is continually a departer from use and wont; he goes the length of attempting homicide (not, perhaps, without justification); and Mr. Stevenson delights to paint each upheaval of the man's own spirit that bursts the petrified surface. Not that, in a sense, he despises common things. He has a poet's eye for all the primitive facts of life, for all the familiar mysteries; a man has only to be in love with his wife and show it, and responsive chords sound on the instant; there is nothing so pretty, nothing so sympathetic, in the "Inland

"" Kidnapped; pursuers of transcendental medicines in "Dr. Jekyll;" traders in the South Sea tales; speculators in the "Wrecker" (Mr. Stevenson only recognizes commerce when it is a gamble); even Mr. David Balfour is an adventurer, too, engaging, like Socrates in the "Republic," in a wild-goose chase after justice. David's later adventures lead him into lovemaking; but, speaking generally, these people are plunged in too turbulent pursuits for ladies to step upon the scene. If there is wooing, it is apt to be done in summary fashion, like the young man's inside the Sieur de Maletroit's door. Only a few of the earlier stories deal principally with courtship; and in them people are violently, boisterously in love; for a painting of strong but not ignoble passion, whipped to fury by exciting circumstances, it would be hard to better the "Pavilion on the Links." These are not the " "anæmic and tailorish persons," the common run of civilized humanity, in connection with whom (see "Virginibus Puerisque ") it is ridiculous to talk of love as a masterful divinity.

In the later books, singularly enough,

love plays a larger part.

silent devotion to his

In

Henry Duric's | and "Travels with a Donkey in the wife is finely Cevennes"? Not I; though if anydrawn in the "Master of Ballantræ; thing could turn the scale of such imin "Catriona we have, for the first partial delight, it would be the donkey. time from Mr. Stevensou, what is ordi- Sterue's “Sentimental Journey "" is narily described as a love-story. It is their only parallel (doubtless, too, their not, heaven knows, that he ever posed original); but Sterne has his faults of as a woman-hater or contemned the taste, from which Mr. Stevenson is of interest of sex; few men have written all men the freest. "The Silverado more eloquently and suggestively of Squatters," less interesting than either love; but his choice of subjects for- of those I named, is even a greater bade its appearance. Even in these technical triumph; being a book of latter stories, where love is the motive, description, almost unrelieved by incithe pivot of the action, and where dent, which yet is thoroughly readable. women are drawn with detail, he falls" Across the Plains," though published back upon the simplest and most prim- recently, recounts an experience apparitive types. Uma, in the "Beach of ently earlier than the squatting. Falesà," is a delightful and most the forthcoming edition these essays womanly savage; Catriona, the lady of are to be re-arranged, and it will be inthe hillside, is a sort of Scotch Uma. teresting to see how their author groups True, in "Prince Otto," Mr. Stevenson this pair. The second book is probimitates the author of "Harry Rich-ably a diary, rehandled in later years; mond," and sketches brilliant ladies; at all events, it contains at least one but they are of a type whose very passage, a defence of the Chinese, essence is superficiality; feminine which it would be impossible to overrather than womanly. Miss Grant, praise, and which appears maturer in who is charming, and Alison Durie, are thought and style than anything in the really his only full-length portraits of earlier book. But, look as you please civilized women; and Uma is worth and where you please, it is hard to the pair of them. Always one is met trace any immaturity in Mr. Stevenby the feeling that the world of these son's style; at the most, one is conbooks is peopled by a floating popula-scious in his earlier work of a looser tion, among whom women are few and texture in the words and a gentler not prominent. Life's peaceful em- utterance. Certainly, the matter has ployments, woman's native sphere, Mr. Stevenson passes over. Except the distracted house of Durrisdeer, I do not recall that he has drawn one home; and I think the sense of limitation in his achievement which forces itself on his admirers is due to this gipsy strain which estranges him perceptibly from so large a province in human nature.

Detraction itself can hardly say more against him; and how many people are under a personal obligation to Mr. Stevenson for having taken the trouble to be born? It must be a hard reader to please who cannot find his account

somewhere in so versatile an author.

To begin with, he has written the best books of travel in the language, if one looks to literary interest, and not to geographical curiosity. Who shall decide between "An Inland Voyage"

grown sterner in this admirable series of essays, which alone would give their author permanent rank in literature. Here, for instance, is a characteristic passage from "Virginibus Puerisque,” which appeared before "Treasure Island :

The blind bow-boy who smiles upon us from the end of terraces in old Dutch gardens, laughingly hails his bird-bolts among a fleeting generation. But for as fast as ever he shoots, the game dissolves and disappears into eternity from under his falling arrows; this one is gone ere he is struck; the other has but time to make one gesture and give one passionate cry, and they are all the things of a moment. When the when the thirty years' panorama has been generation is gone, when the play is over, withdrawn in tatters from the stage of the world, we may ask what has become of these great, weighty, and undying loves,

and a few children who have retained some
happy stamp from the disposition of their
parents,

Set beside this harmonious and soft-
toned moralizing a passage from the
essay called "Pulvis et Umbra," in
"Across the Plains : "

We look for some reward of our en

and the sweethearts who despised mortal | experience. Yet after all, how well
conditions in a fine credulity; and they marriage turns out, and how real love
can only show us a few songs in a bygone is to the lover. That is the keynote.
taste, a few actions worth remembering, Why look at a thing from the stand-
point of the sun when you have got to
live on earth? Seventy years is a
moment in time; one day may seem
eternity to the creature.
Dolls are
stuffed with sawdust - it does not do
to forget that but they make excel-
lent playthings. "Fools all in our
youth," is the refrain of "Virginibus
matter is, "for God's sake give me the
Puerisque," but the conclusion of the
young man who has brains enough to
"Pulvis et
make a fool of himself."
Umbra Sumus" (the second essay I
quoted from) sits in judgment, not
upon life's illusions but upon life itself.
In a tremendous rhetorical statement it
displays the appalling disproportion
between ephemeral humanity and the
Cosmos; and the more frightful con-
trast between human ideals, insep-
arable from humanity, and lustful,
murderous, predatory man, man with
all his aspirations eternally foredoomed
to failure, yet at his lowest cherishing
a spark of magnanimity, some self-
erected code of honor. Failure, that is
the note of it all; failure and aspira-
tion, the ebb and flow of human exist-
ence. Of a future life these essays
have nothing to say, save to recognize
as a fact in man's higher life his crav-
ing for protracted existence. What
they preach and they do literally
preach - relates to this life, and the
spirit in which a man should go about
his business. That is the important
thing; we can do so infinitely little,
that it matters incomparably more what
we are than what we accomplish.
"Gentleness, cheerfulness, these come
before all morality; they are the per-
a cour-fect virtues."

deavors and are disappointed; not success,
not happiness, not even peace of con-
science, crowns our ineffectual efforts to
do well. Our frailties are invincible, our
virtues barren; the battle goes sore against
us to the going down of the sun. The
canting moralist tells us of right and
wrong; and we look abroad, even on the
face of our small earth, and find them
change with every climate, and no country
where some action is not honored for a
virtue and none where it is not branded for
a vice; and we look in our experience and
find no vital congruity in the wisest rules,
but at the best a municipal fitness. It is
not strange if we are tempted to despair of
good. We ask too much. Our religions
and moralities have been trimmed to flatter
us till they are all emasculate and senti-
mentalized, and only please and weaken.
Truth is of a rougher strain. In the harsh
face of life, faith can read a bracing gospel.
The human race is a thing more ancient
than the Ten Commandments; and the
bones and revolutions of the Kosmos, in
whose joints we are but moss and fungus,
more ancient still.

The process has taken place, which is described with singular charm in the essay "Crabbed Age and Youth;" time has done its inevitable work of modifying beliefs and aspirations, yet, though the tone changes, the philosophy remains fundamentally the same. Mr. Stevenson preaches optimism ageous but not a sanguine optimism. Certain phrases in the earlier book, In " Virginibus Puerisque the ro- which gave offence to austere moralmance of life chiefly is called in ques- ists, really pointed to the same orthotion - love, marriage, ambition, honor. dox conclusion. "To be a good artist Analyze them a little, says he, and in life, and to deserve well of your what silly businesses they seem; how neighbor," is a high enough ideal, if overloaded with sounding epithets. you mean by an artist what Mr. StevenMarriage, for instance the "raw boy son does; that is, a man who goes and green girl" linking their joint in- about his work pleasantly, because he

The cruellest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator.

Of

course, everybody in writing recognizes conditions of this kind, but Mr. Stevenson has made them almost as

doubt by this time he can move with perfect ease in his self-imposed fetters ; but the fabric of his writings is compact of exigencies of sound no less than of sense. It is, however, only in the essays that he indulges himself in such passages as this, which describes a diver's motions in the buoyant waters.

likes it, and does it for the work's sake, not to get rich; and who always sets his standard a little way above what his utmost efforts can attain to. That is the connecting point between his didactic philosophy of art and his theory of Obviously the word "teeth ” gives morals. You have no business, he this sentence an affected look; and I says, to cry out because you are not a take designedly a case where the artisaint; aim at being a little better than fice is flagrant. But the reason for you are. So you will progress, always writing "teeth" is plain enough; if failing, but nevertheless advancing; you put instead "opened his mouth " aim at the inaccessible and you will you have an awkward recurrence of collapse. Just as it is bad morals for a the diphthong from "hours," and the man to neglect his wife and family be-ear misses the sharp dental "t." cause he thinks to bring about a great reform, so it is bad art for the artist to attempt a great work before he has accomplished what is easier. Mr. Ste-peremptory as the laws of metre. No venson preaches in art the gospel of technical thoroughness, a lesson familiar enough in France, but necessary in England. Like all masters of technical skill he has the desire to impart what is communicable in his own cunning to found a school. And he has done it; one has only to look round and see that. He has done for English fiction what Tennyson did for English verse; So must have ineffectually swung, so rehe has raised the standard of contem-sented their inefficiency, those light crowds porary workmanship; but, unlike Ten- which followed the Star of Hades and nyson, he has done it by precept no uttered exiguous voices in the regions beless than by example. Admirable yond Cocytus. critic as he is, he is most instructive when he writes concerning his own work and methods. Those who wish to profit by his teaching need not complain for lack of guidance. Shortly after publication of " Treasure Island," there appeared an essay on "Style," of the most minutely technical character, which I hope to see reprinted in the new edition. Most writers confine their care to the mere avoidance of a hiatus; alliteration, simple or interlaced, is also a familiar trick of the trade. But Mr. Stevenson contends that not only the initial consonant, but also the medial and the terminal should be taken carefully into account; that labials should be interspersed with dentals, dentals modified by nasals, and so on. An example will explain the matter roughly. In "Virginibus Puerisque occurs the following passage (upon "Truth of Intercourse"):

The truth is that writing of this sort comes far nearer verse than prose, with its intricate combination of medial and initial consonants, its studied harmonies of sound. Prose in its perfection is the perfection of a sentence which might imaginably occur in talk or oratory; it ought never to lose some relation to spoken speech. Even Carlyle's style was modelled (or so he said) upon the way in which his father talked. But any human being would stone a man who talked like the passage I have just quoted. It is rhythmic prose, or prose poetry, a hybrid to which hardly any one but Mr. Stevenson can reconcile readers. Yet in the same volume (Across the Plains) there are pages upon pages of prose which is really prose, and which has every merit except artlessness. In his own person Mr. Stevenson can never be unstudied; his

mannerism has even grown upon him; | Plains ;" it is a comparison of Eurowhen he is really simple, he is so dra-pean and American sunrises: matically, a more cunning trick than It may be from habit, but to me the the other. Curiously enough, in the coming of day is less fresh and inspiriting interesting paper about the genesis of in the latter; it has a duskier glory, and "Treasure Island," which he wrote for more nearly resembles sunset; it seems to the Idler Mr. Stevenson seems to fit some subsequential1 evening epoch of imply that the manner of "Treasure the world, as though America were in fact Island" is easier to support than the and not merely in fancy farther from the manner of the "Merry Men," one of orient of Aurora and the springs of day. his most elaborate efforts. Perhaps he Here one is grateful for the strange only means that it would seem so; but word "subsequential;" it fills with surely few people think it easier to be such dignity its central place in this effectively simple thau effectively elab-commanding sentence that no one orate. At all events, one thing is no- would care to challenge the innovation. ticeable. In the collaborations the But when it comes to ballads, this writers narrate in person; the story of Latin element plays wild havoc with the "Wrecker," it is true, is told by the fitness of things:

Mr. Loudon Dodd, one of the heroes.

But is not Mr. Dodd a very near rela- Clustered the scarcely nubile, the lads and maids in a ring, tion to the distinguished writer who

a

resides in Samoa? (Mr. Stevenson is clement instance. "Arduous has said in the Idler that John Silver mountains," "green continuous forwas drawn from a personage he es-ests," are Latinisms hardly more adteemed; he cannot, therefore, justly missible (above all, in a ballad) than resent our identifying him with this "your fishing has sped to a wish," amiable Epicurean.) But in the books which is an ugly imitation from the where Mr. Osbourne has no hand, the French. This is criticism of mere denarrative is always dramatic, and the tails, but in truth, if I judge it rightly, personage selected to narrate is always Mr. Stevenson's poetry will never add one who has no business to "parley anything to his reputation. In his voleuphuism." Hawkins, of "Treasure ume of "Ballads," the third cauto of Island" fame, is a plain Englishman; the "Song of Rahero" is a fine tale, David Balfour is a plain Scot, a casuist finely told in verse; and the "Slaying it is true, but homely in his talk (my of Tamatea" is good reading; there is objection of unhomeliness can hardly nothing else for which I am grateful. be urged against "Kidnapped" and "Underwoods" is in its English verses "Catriona "). Mackellar is another the most imitative work of any estabmoralist, but no seeker after the pictur-lished writer known to me. Sometimes esque in diction; and in the "Beach you hear a snatch of Herrick, then the of Falesà a complicated story is told tone is Wordsworth's; Tennyson is with extraordinary force by the hero, a everywhere here, as also he is in the half-educated trader. There is only" Ballads ;" and Marvell is suggested one page where the familiar turn of the Stevensonian sentence peeps out; I will deny no one the pleasure of discovering it for himself in so agreeable a hunting-ground.

What I may call Mr. Stevenson's personal style (as opposed to the dramatic narration) has a curiously marked feature in its Latinity; evidently a consequence of straining the vocabulary to comply with his requirement of sound. Here is an instance from "Across the

now and then. Unless the half-familiar dialect conceals defects, the Scotch verses are better; but the prose preface of thanks to doctors is worth in manner and in matter all the poems together. About a "Child's Garden of Verse" it is less easy to speak with confidence; to many people it appeals strongly; others, perhaps, it strikes chiefly as a tour de force; but in any

1 Italics throughout are mine.