Transcribed from the Charles Scribner’s Sons 1905
edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
a record, an
estimate, and a memorial

By
ALEXANDER H. JAPP, LL.D., F.R.S.E

author
of “thoreau: his life and aims”; “memoir of thomas de quincey”;
“de quincey memorials,”
etc., etc.

WITH HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED LETTERS
FROM R. L. STEVENSON IN FACSIMILIE . . .

second
edition

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
153-157 FIFTH AVENUE
1905

Printed in Great
Britain.

Dedicated to
C. A. LICHTENBERG, Esq.
and
Mrs LICHTENBERG,
of villa margherita, treviso,
with most grateful regards,

ALEXANDER H. JAPP.

19th December 1904.

PREFACE

A few words may here be allowed me to explain one or two
points.  First, about the facsimile of last page of Preface
to Familiar Studies of Men and Books.  Stevenson was
in Davos when the greater portion of that work went through the
press.  He felt so much the disadvantage of being there in
the circumstances (both himself and his wife ill) that he begged
me to read the proofs of the Preface for him.  This illness
has record in the letter from him (pp. 28-29).  The
printers, of course, had directions to send the copy and proofs
of the Preface to me.  Hence I am able now to give this
facsimile.

With regard to the letter at p. 19, of which facsimile is also
given, what Stevenson there meant is not the “three
last” of that batch, but the three last sent to me
before—though that was an error on his part—he only
then sent two chapters, making the “eleven chapters
now”—sent to me by post.

Another point on which I might have dwelt and illustrated by
many instances is this, that though Stevenson was fond of
hob-nobbing with all sorts and conditions of men, this desire of
wide contact and intercourse has little show in his
novels—the ordinary fibre of commonplace human beings not
receiving much celebration from him there; another case in which
his private bent and sympathies received little illustration in
his novels.  But the fact lies implicit in much I have
written.

I have to thank many authors for permission to quote extracts
I have used.

ALEXANDER H. JAPP.

CONTENTS

I.      INTRODUCTION AND FIRST
IMPRESSIONS
II.     TREASURE ISLAND AND SOME
REMINISCENCES
III.    THE CHILD FATHER OF THE MAN
IV.     HEREDITY ILLUSTRATED
V.      TRAVELS
VI.     SOME EARLIER LETTERS
VII.    THE VAILIMA LETTERS
VIII.   WORK OF LATER YEARS
IX.     SOME CHARACTERISTICS
X.      A SAMOAN MEMORIAL OF R. L.
STEVENSON
XI.     MISS STUBBS’ RECORD OF A
PILGRIMAGE
XII.    HIS GENIUS AND METHODS
XIII.   PREACHER AND MYSTIC FABULIST
XIV.    STEVENSON AS DRAMATIST
XV.     THEORY OF GOOD AND EVIL
XVI.    STEVENSON’S GLOOM
XVII.   PROOFS OF GROWTH
XVIII.  EARLIER DETERMINATIONS AND RESULTS
XIX.    MR EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN’S
ESTIMATE
XX.     EGOTISTIC ELEMENT AND ITS EFFECTS
XXI.    UNITY IN STEVENSON’S STORIES
XXII.   PERSONAL CHEERFULNESS AND INVENTED GLOOM
XXIII.  EDINBURGH REVIEWERS’ DICTA INAPPLICABLE TO
LATER WORK
XXIV.   MR HENLEY’S SPITEFUL PERVERSIONS
XXV.    MR CHRISTIE MURRAY’S IMPRESSIONS
XXVI.   HERO-VILLAINS
XXVII.  MR G. MOORE, MR MARRIOTT WATSON, AND OTHERS
XXVIII. UNEXPECTED COMBINATIONS
XXIX.   LOVE OF VAGABONDS
XXX.    LORD ROSEBERY’S CASE
XXXI.   MR GOSSE AND MS. OF TREASURE ISLAND
XXXII.  STEVENSON PORTRAITS
XXXIII. LAPSES AND ERRORS IN CRITICISM
XXXIV.  LETTERS AND POEMS IN TESTIMONY
APPENDIX

CHAPTER I—INTRODUCTION AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS

My little effort to make Thoreau better known in England had
one result that I am pleased to think of.  It brought me
into personal association with R. L. Stevenson, who had written
and published in The Cornhill Magazine an essay on
Thoreau, in whom he had for some time taken an interest.  He
found in Thoreau not only a rare character for originality,
courage, and indefatigable independence, but also a master of
style, to whom, on this account, as much as any, he was inclined
to play the part of the “sedulous ape,” as he had
acknowledged doing to many others—a later exercise, perhaps
in some ways as fruitful as any that had gone before.  A
recent poet, having had some seeds of plants sent to him from
Northern Scotland to the South, celebrated his setting of them
beside those native to the Surrey slope on which he dwelt, with
the lines—

“And when the Northern seeds are growing,
Another beauty then bestowing,
We shall be fine, and North to South
Be giving kisses, mouth to mouth.”

So the Thoreau influence on Stevenson was as if a tart
American wild-apple had been grafted on an English pippin, and
produced a wholly new kind with the flavours of both; and here
wild America and England kissed each other mouth to mouth.

The direct result was the essay in The Cornhill, but
the indirect results were many and less easily assessed, as
Stevenson himself, as we shall see, was ever ready to
admit.  The essay on Thoreau was written in America, which
further, perhaps, bears out my point.

One of the authorities, quoted by Mr Hammerton, in
Stevensoniana says of the circumstances in which he found
our author, when he was busily engaged on that bit of work:

“I have visited him in a lonely lodging in
California, it was previous to his happy marriage, and found him
submerged in billows of bed-clothes; about him floated the
scattered volumes of a complete set of Thoreau; he was preparing
an essay on that worthy, and he looked at the moment like a
half-drowned man, yet he was not cast down.  His work, an
endless task, was better than a straw to him.  It was to
become his life-preserver and to prolong his years.  I feel
convinced that without it he must have surrendered long
since.  I found Stevenson a man of the frailest physique,
though most unaccountably tenacious of life; a man whose pen was
indefatigable, whose brain was never at rest, who, as far as I am
able to judge, looked upon everybody and everything from a
supremely intellectual point of view.”  [1]

We remember the common belief in Yorkshire and other parts
that a man could not die so long as he could stand up—a
belief on which poor Branwell Brontë was fain to act and to
illustrate, but R. L. Stevenson illustrated it, as this writer
shows, in a better, calmer, and healthier way, despite his lack
of health.

On some little points of fact, however, Stevenson was wrong;
and I wrote to the Editor of The Spectator a letter,
titled, I think, “Thoreau’s Pity and Humour,”
which he inserted.  This brought me a private letter from
Stevenson, who expressed the wish to see me, and have some talk
with me on that and other matters.  To this letter I at once
replied, directing to 17 Heriot Row, Edinburgh, saying that, as I
was soon to be in that City, it might be possible for me to see
him there.  In reply to this letter Mr Stevenson wrote:

“The Cottage, Castleton of Braemar,
Sunday, August (? th), 1881.

“My dear Sir,—I should
long ago have written to thank you for your kind and frank
letter; but, in my state of health, papers are apt to get
mislaid, and your letter has been vainly hunted for until this
(Sunday) morning.

“I must first say a word as to not quoting your book by
name.  It was the consciousness that we disagreed which led
me, I daresay, wrongly, to suppress all references
throughout the paper.  But you may be certain a proper
reference will now be introduced.

“I regret I shall not be able to see you in Edinburgh:
one visit to Edinburgh has already cost me too dear in that
invaluable particular, health; but if it should be at all
possible for you to pass by Braemar, I believe you would find an
attentive listener, and I can offer you a bed, a drive, and
necessary food.

“If, however, you should not be able to come thus far, I
can promise two things.  First, I shall religiously revise
what I have written, and bring out more clearly the point of view
from which I regarded Thoreau.  Second, I shall in the
preface record your objection.

“The point of view (and I must ask you not to forget
that any such short paper is essentially only a section
through a man) was this: I desired to look at the man through
his books.  Thus, for instance, when I mentioned his return
to the pencil-making, I did it only in passing (perhaps I was
wrong), because it seemed to me not an illustration of his
principles, but a brave departure from them.  Thousands of
such there were I do not doubt; still they might be hardly to my
purpose; though, as you say so, I suppose some of them would
be.

“Our difference as to ‘pity,’ I suspect, was
a logomachy of my making.  No pitiful acts, on his part,
would surprise me: I know he would be more pitiful in practice
than most of the whiners; but the spirit of that practice would
still seem to me to be unjustly described by the word pity.

“When I try to be measured, I find myself usually
suspected of a sneaking unkindness for my subject, but you may be
sure, sir, I would give up most other things to be as good a man
as Thoreau.  Even my knowledge of him leads me thus far.

“Should you find yourself able to push on so
far—it may even lie on your way—believe me your visit
will be very welcome.  The weather is cruel, but the place
is, as I daresay you know, the very wale of
Scotland—bar Tummelside.—Yours very sincerely,

Robert Louis
Stevenson.”

Some delay took place in my leaving London for Scotland, and
hence what seemed a hitch.  I wrote mentioning the reason of
my delay, and expressing the fear that I might have to forego the
prospect of seeing him in Braemar, as his circumstances might
have altered in the meantime.  In answer came this note,
like so many, if not most of his, indeed, without
date:—

The
Cottage, Castleton of Braemar.
(No date.)

“My dear Sir,—I am here
as yet a fixture, and beg you to come our way.  Would
Tuesday or Wednesday suit you by any chance?  We shall then,
I believe, be empty: a thing favourable to talks.  You get
here in time for dinner.  I stay till near the end of
September, unless, as may very well be, the weather drive me
forth.—Yours very sincerely, Robert
Louis Stevenson.”

I accordingly went to Braemar, where he and his wife and her
son were staying with his father and mother.

These were red-letter days in my calendar alike on account of
pleasant intercourse with his honoured father and himself. 
Here is my pen-and-ink portrait of R. L. Stevenson, thrown down
at the time:

Mr Stevenson’s is, indeed, a very picturesque and
striking figure.  Not so tall probably as he seems at first
sight from his extreme thinness, but the pose and air could not
be otherwise described than as distinguished.  Head of fine
type, carried well on the shoulders and in walking with the
impression of being a little thrown back; long brown hair,
falling from under a broadish-brimmed Spanish form of soft felt
hat, Rembrandtesque; loose kind of Inverness cape when walking,
and invariable velvet jacket inside the house.  You would
say at first sight, wherever you saw him, that he was a man of
intellect, artistic and individual, wholly out of the
common.  His face is sensitive, full of expression, though
it could not be called strictly beautiful.  It is longish,
especially seen in profile, and features a little irregular; the
brow at once high and broad.  A hint of vagary, and just a
hint in the expression, is qualified by the eyes, which are set
rather far apart from each other as seems, and with a most
wistful, and at the same time possibly a merry impish expression
arising over that, yet frank and clear, piercing, but at the same
time steady, and fall on you with a gentle radiance and animation
as he speaks.  Romance, if with an indescribable
soupçon of whimsicality, is marked upon him;
sometimes he has the look as of the Ancient Mariner, and could
fix you with his glittering e’e, and he would, as he points
his sentences with a movement of his thin white forefinger, when
this is not monopolised with the almost incessant
cigarette.  There is a faint suggestion of a hair-brained
sentimental trace on his countenance, but controlled, after all,
by good Scotch sense and shrewdness.  In conversation he is
very animated, and likes to ask questions.  A favourite and
characteristic attitude with him was to put his foot on a chair
or stool and rest his elbow on his knee, with his chin on his
hand; or to sit, or rather to half sit, half lean, on the corner
of a table or desk, one of his legs swinging freely, and when
anything that tickled him was said he would laugh in the
heartiest manner, even at the risk of bringing on his cough,
which at that time was troublesome.  Often when he got
animated he rose and walked about as he spoke, as if movement
aided thought and expression.  Though he loved Edinburgh,
which was full of associations for him, he had no good word for
its east winds, which to him were as death.  Yet he passed
one winter as a “Silverado squatter,” the story of
which he has inimitably told in the volume titled The
Silverado Squatters; and he afterwards spent several winters
at Davos Platz, where, as he said to me, he not only breathed
good air, but learned to know with closest intimacy John
Addington Symonds, who “though his books were good, was far
finer and more interesting than any of his books.”  He
needed a good deal of nursery attentions, but his invalidism was
never obtrusively brought before one in any sympathy-seeking way
by himself; on the contrary, a very manly, self-sustaining spirit
was evident; and the amount of work which he managed to turn out
even when at his worst was truly surprising.

His wife, an American lady, is highly cultured, and is herself
an author.  In her speech there is just the slightest
suggestion of the American accent, which only made it the more
pleasing to my ear.  She is heart and soul devoted to her
husband, proud of his achievements, and her delight is the
consciousness of substantially aiding him in his enterprises.

They then had with them a boy of eleven or twelve, Samuel
Lloyd Osbourne, to be much referred to later (a son of Mrs
Stevenson by a former marriage), whose delight was to draw the
oddest, but perhaps half intentional or unintentional
caricatures, funny, in some cases, beyond expression.  His
room was designated the picture-gallery, and on entering I could
scarce refrain from bursting into laughter, even at the general
effect, and, noticing this, and that I was putting some restraint
on myself out of respect for the host’s feelings, Stevenson
said to me with a sly wink and a gentle dig in the ribs,
“It’s laugh and be thankful here.”  On
Lloyd’s account simple engraving materials, types, and a
small printing-press had been procured; and it was
Stevenson’s delight to make funny poems, stories, and
morals for the engravings executed, and all would be duly printed
together.  Stevenson’s thorough enjoyment of the
picture-gallery, and his goodness to Lloyd, becoming himself a
very boy for the nonce, were delightful to witness and in degree
to share.  Wherever they were—at Braemar, in
Edinburgh, at Davos Platz, or even at Silverado—the
engraving and printing went on.  The mention of the
picture-gallery suggests that it was out of his interest in the
colour-drawing and the picture-gallery that his first published
story, Treasure Island, grew, as we shall see.

I have some copies of the rude printing-press productions,
inexpressibly quaint, grotesque, a kind of literary horse-play,
yet with a certain squint-eyed, sprawling genius in it, and
innocent childish Rabelaisian mirth of a sort.  At all
events I cannot look at the slight memorials of that time, which
I still possess, without laughing afresh till my eyes are
dewy.  Stevenson, as I understood, began Treasure
Island more to entertain Lloyd Osbourne than anything else;
the chapters being regularly read to the family circle as they
were written, and with scarcely a purpose beyond.  The lad
became Stevenson’s trusted companion and
collaborator—clearly with a touch of genius.

I have before me as I write some of these funny momentoes of
that time, carefully kept, often looked at.  One of them is,
“The Black Canyon; or, Wild Adventures in
the Far West: a Tale of Instruction and Amusement for the
Young, by Samuel L. Osbourne, printed by the author; Davos
Platz,” with the most remarkable cuts.  It would not
do some of the sensationalists anything but good to read it even
at this day, since many points in their art are absurdly
caricatured.  Another is “Moral Emblems; a
Collection of Cuts and Verses, by R. L. Stevenson, author of
the Blue Scalper, etc., etc.  Printers, S. L.
Osbourne and Company, Davos Platz.”  Here are the
lines to a rare piece of grotesque, titled A Peak in
Darien—

“Broad-gazing on untrodden lands,
See where adventurous Cortez stands,
While in the heavens above his head,
The eagle seeks its daily bread.
How aptly fact to fact replies,
Heroes and eagles, hills and skies.
Ye, who contemn the fatted slave,
Look on this emblem and be brave.”

Another, The Elephant, has these lines—

“See in the print how, moved by whim,
Trumpeting Jumbo, great and grim,
Adjusts his trunk, like a cravat,
To noose that individual’s hat;
The Sacred Ibis in the distance,
Joys to observe his bold resistance.”

R. L. Stevenson wrote from Davos Platz, in sending me The
Black Canyon:

“Sam sends as a present a work of his
own.  I hope you feel flattered, for this is simply the
first time he has ever given one away.  I have to buy my
own works, I can tell you.”

Later he said, in sending a second:

“I own I have delayed this letter till I
could forward the enclosed.  Remembering the night at
Braemar, when we visited the picture-gallery, I hope it may amuse
you: you see we do some publishing hereaway.”

Delightfully suggestive and highly enjoyable, too, were the
meetings in the little drawing-room after dinner, when the
contrasted traits of father and son came into full
play—when R. L. Stevenson would sometimes draw out a new
view by bold, half-paradoxical assertion, or compel advance on
the point from a new quarter by a searching question couched in
the simplest language, or reveal his own latest conviction
finally, by a few sentences as nicely rounded off as though they
had been written, while he rose and gently moved about, as his
habit was, in the course of those more extended remarks. 
Then a chapter or two of The Sea-Cook would be read, with
due pronouncement on the main points by one or other of the
family audience.

The reading of the book is one thing.  It was quite
another thing to hear Stevenson as he stood reading it aloud,
with his hand stretched out holding the manuscript, and his body
gently swaying as a kind of rhythmical commentary on the
story.  His fine voice, clear and keen it some of its tones,
had a wonderful power of inflection and variation, and when he
came to stand in the place of Silver you could almost have
imagined you saw the great one-legged John Silver, joyous-eyed,
on the rolling sea.  Yes, to read it in print was good, but
better yet to hear Stevenson read it.

CHAPTER II—TREASURE ISLAND AND SOME
REMINISCENCES

When I left Braemar, I carried with me a considerable portion
of the MS. of Treasure Island, with an outline of the rest
of the story.  It originally bore the odd title of The
Sea-Cook, and, as I have told before, I showed it to Mr
Henderson, the proprietor of the Young Folks’ Paper,
who came to an arrangement with Mr Stevenson, and the story duly
appeared in its pages, as well as the two which succeeded it.

Stevenson himself in his article in The Idler for
August 1894 (reprinted in My First Book volume and in a
late volume of the Edinburgh Edition) has recalled some of
the circumstances connected with this visit of mine to Braemar,
as it bore on the destination of Treasure Island:

“And now, who should come dropping in, ex
machinâ, but Dr Japp, like the disguised prince, who is
to bring down the curtain upon peace and happiness in the last
act; for he carried in his pocket, not a horn or a talisman, but
a publisher, in fact, ready to unearth new writers for my old
friend Mr Henderson’s Young Folks.  Even the
ruthlessness of a united family recoiled before the extreme
measure of inflicting on our guest the mutilated members of
The Sea-Cook; at the same time, we would by no means stop
our readings, and accordingly the tale was begun again at the
beginning, and solemnly redelivered for the benefit of Dr
Japp.  From that moment on, I have thought highly of his
critical faculty; for when he left us, he carried away the
manuscript in his portmanteau.

“Treasure Island—it was Mr Henderson who
deleted the first title, The Sea-Cook—appeared duly
in Young Folks, where it figured in the ignoble midst
without woodcuts, and attracted not the least attention.  I
did not care.  I liked the tale myself, for much the same
reason as my father liked the beginning: it was my kind of
picturesque.  I was not a little proud of John Silver also;
and to this day rather admire that smooth and formidable
adventurer.  What was infinitely more exhilarating, I had
passed a landmark.  I had finished a tale and written The
End upon my manuscript, as I had not done since The Pentland
Rising, when I was a boy of sixteen, not yet at
college.  In truth, it was so by a lucky set of accidents:
had not Dr Japp come on his visit, had not the tale flowed from
me with singular ease, it must have been laid aside, like its
predecessors, and found a circuitous and unlamented way to the
fire.  Purists may suggest it would have been better
so.  I am not of that mind.  The tale seems to have
given much pleasure, and it brought (or was the means of
bringing) fire, food, and wine to a deserving family in which I
took an interest.  I need scarcely say I mean my
own.”

He himself gives a goodly list of the predecessors which had
“found a circuitous and unlamented way to the
fire”:

“As soon as I was able to write, I became a
good friend to the paper-makers.  Reams upon reams must have
gone to the making of Rathillet, The Pentland
Rising, The King’s Pardon (otherwise Park
Whitehead), Edward Daven, A Country Dance, and
A Vendetta in the West.  Rathillet was
attempted before fifteen, The Vendetta at twenty-nine, and
the succession of defeats lasted unbroken till I was
thirty-one.”

Another thing I carried from Braemar with me which I greatly
prize—this was a copy of Christianity confirmed by
Jewish and Heathen Testimony, by Mr Stevenson’s father,
with his autograph signature and many of his own marginal
notes.  He had thought deeply on many
subjects—theological, scientific, and social—and had
recorded, I am afraid, but the smaller half of his thoughts and
speculations.  Several days in the mornings, before R. L.
Stevenson was able to face the somewhat “snell” air
of the hills, I had long walks with the old gentleman, when we
also had long talks on many subjects—the liberalising of
the Scottish Church, educational reform, etc.; and, on one
occasion, a statement of his reason, because of the subscription,
for never having become an elder.  That he had in some small
measure enjoyed my society, as I certainly had much enjoyed his,
was borne out by a letter which I received from the son in reply
to one I had written, saying that surely his father had never
meant to present me at the last moment on my leaving by coach
with that volume, with his name on it, and with pencilled notes
here and there, but had merely given it me to read and
return.  In the circumstances I may perhaps be excused
quoting from a letter dated Castleton of Braemar, September 1881,
in illustration of what I have said—

“My dear Dr
Japp,—My father has gone, but I think I may take it
upon me to ask you to keep the book.  Of all things you
could do to endear yourself to me you have done the best, for,
from your letter, you have taken a fancy to my father.

“I do not know how to thank you for your kind trouble in
the matter of The Sea-Cook, but I am not unmindful. 
My health is still poorly, and I have added intercostal
rheumatism—a new attraction, which sewed me up nearly
double for two days, and still gives me ‘a list to
starboard’—let us be ever nautical. . . . I do not
think with the start I have, there will be any difficulty in
letting Mr Henderson go ahead whenever he likes.  I will
write my story up to its legitimate conclusion, and then we shall
be in a position to judge whether a sequel would be desirable,
and I myself would then know better about its practicability from
the story-telling point of view.—Yours very sincerely,
Robert Louis Stevenson.”

A little later came the following:—

“The Cottage, Castleton of Braemar.
(No date.)

“My dear Dr
Japp,—Herewith go nine chapters.  I have been a
little seedy; and the two last that I have written seem to me on
a false venue; hence the smallness of the batch.  I have
now, I hope, in the three last sent, turned the corner, with no
great amount of dulness.

“The map, with all its names, notes, soundings, and
things, should make, I believe, an admirable advertisement for
the story.  Eh?

“I hope you got a telegram and letter I forwarded after
you to Dinnat.—Believe me, yours very sincerely, Robert Louis Stevenson.”

In the afternoon, if fine and dry, we went walking, and
Stevenson would sometimes tell us stories of his short experience
at the Scottish Bar, and of his first and only brief.  I
remember him contrasting that with his experiences as an engineer
with Bob Bain, who, as manager, was then superintending the
building of a breakwater.  Of that time, too, he told the
choicest stories, and especially of how, against all orders, he
bribed Bob with five shillings to let him go down in the
diver’s dress.  He gave us a splendid
description—finer, I think, than even that in his
Memories—of his sensations on the sea-bottom, which
seems to have interested him as deeply, and suggested as many
strange fancies, as anything which he ever came across on the
surface.  But the possibility of enterprises of this sort
ended—Stevenson lost his interest in engineering.

Stevenson’s father had, indeed, been much exercised in
his day by theological questions and difficulties, and though he
remained a staunch adherent of the Established Church of Scotland
he knew well and practically what is meant by the term
“accommodation,” as it is used by theologians in
reference to creeds and formulas; for he had over and over again,
because of the strict character of the subscription required from
elders of the Scottish Church declined, as I have said, to accept
the office.  In a very express sense you could see that he
bore the marks of his past in many ways—a quick, sensitive,
in some ways even a fantastic-minded man, yet with a strange
solidity and common-sense amid it all, just as though ferns with
the veritable fairies’ seed were to grow out of a common
stone wall.  He looked like a man who had not been without
sleepless nights—without troubles, sorrows, and
perplexities, and even yet, had not wholly risen above some of
them, or the results of them.  His voice was “low and
sweet”—with just a possibility in it of rising to a
shrillish key.  A sincere and faithful man, who had walked
very demurely through life, though with a touch of sudden,
bright, quiet humour and fancy, every now and then crossing the
grey of his characteristic pensiveness or melancholy, and drawing
effect from it.  He was most frank and genial with me, and I
greatly honour his memory. [2]

Thomas Stevenson, with a strange, sad smile, told me how much
of a disappointment, in the first stage, at all events, Louis (he
always called his son Louis at home), had caused him, by failing
to follow up his profession at the Scottish Bar.  How much
he had looked forward, after the engineering was abandoned, to
his devoting himself to the work of the Parliament House (as the
Hall of the Chief Court is called in Scotland, from the building
having been while yet there was a Scottish Parliament the place
where it sat), though truly one cannot help feeling how much
Stevenson’s very air and figure would have been out of
keeping among the bewigged, pushing, sharp-set, hard-featured,
and even red-faced and red-nosed (some of them, at any rate)
company, who daily walked the Parliament House, and talked and
gossiped there, often of other things than law and equity. 
“Well, yes, perhaps it was all for the best,” he
said, with a sigh, on my having interjected the remark that R. L.
Stevenson was wielding far more influence than he ever could have
done as a Scottish counsel, even though he had risen rapidly in
his profession, and become Lord-Advocate or even a judge.

There was, indeed, a very pathetic kind of harking back on the
might-have-beens when I talked with him on this subject.  He
had reconciled himself in a way to the inevitable, and, like a
sensible man, was now inclined to make the most and the best of
it.  The marriage, which, on the report of it, had been but
a new disappointment to him, had, as if by magic, been
transformed into a blessing in his mind and his wife’s by
personal contact with Fanny Van der Griff Stevenson, which no one
who ever met her could wonder at; but, nevertheless, his dream of
seeing his only son walking in the pathways of the Stevensons,
and adorning a profession in Edinburgh, and so winning new and
welcome laurels for the family and the name, was still present
with him constantly, and by contrast, he was depressed with
contemplation of the real state of the case, when, as I have
said, I pointed out to him, as more than once I did, what an
influence his son was wielding now, not only over those near to
him, but throughout the world, compared with what could have come
to him as a lighthouse engineer, however successful, or it may be
as a briefless advocate or barrister, walking, hardly in glory
and in joy, the Hall of the Edinburgh Parliament House.  And
when I pictured the yet greater influence that was sure to come
to him, he only shook his head with that smile which tells of
hopes long-cherished and lost at last, and of resignation gained,
as though at stern duty’s call and an honest desire for the
good of those near and dear to him.  It moved me more than I
can say, and always in the midst of it he adroitly, and somewhat
abruptly, changed the subject.  Such penalties do parents
often pay for the honour of giving geniuses to the world. 
Here, again, it may be true, “the individual withers but
the world is more and more.”

The impression of a kind of tragic fatality was but added to
when Stevenson would speak of his father in such terms of love
and admiration as quite moved one, of his desire to please him,
of his highest respect and gratitude to him, and pride in having
such a father.  It was most characteristic that when, in his
travels in America, he met a gentleman who expressed plainly his
keen disappointment on learning that he had but been introduced
to the son and not to the father—to the as yet but budding
author—and not to the builder of the great lighthouse
beacons that constantly saved mariners from shipwreck round many
stormy coasts, he should record the incident, as his readers will
remember, with such a strange mixture of a pride and filial
gratitude, and half humorous humiliation.  Such is the
penalty a son of genius often pays in heart-throbs for the
inability to do aught else but follow his destiny—follow
his star, even though as Dante says:—

“Se tu segui tua stella
Non puoi fallire a glorioso porto.” [3]

What added a keen thrill as of quivering flesh exposed, was
that Thomas Stevenson on one side was exactly the man to
appreciate such attainments and work in another, and I often
wondered how far the sense of Edinburgh propriety and worldly
estimates did weigh with him here.

Mr Stevenson mentioned to me a peculiar fact which has since
been noted by his son, that, notwithstanding the kind of work he
had so successfully engaged in, he was no mathematician, and had
to submit his calculations to another to be worked out in
definite mathematical formulæ.  Thomas Stevenson gave
one the impression of a remarkably sweet, great personality,
grave, anxious, almost morbidly forecasting, yet full of
childlike hope and ready affection, but, perhaps, so earnestly
taken up with some points as to exaggerate their importance and
be too self-conscious and easily offended in respect to
them.  But there was no affectation in him.  He was
simple-minded, sincere to the core; most kindly, homely,
hospitable, much intent on brotherly offices.  He had the
Scottish perfervidum too—he could tolerate nothing
mean or creeping; and his eye would lighten and glance in a
striking manner when such was spoken of.  I have since heard
that his charities were very extensive, and dispensed in the most
hidden and secret ways.  He acted here on the Scripture
direction, “Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand
doeth.”  He was much exercised when I saw him about
some defects, as he held, in the methods of Scotch education (for
he was a true lover of youth, and cared more for character being
formed than for heads being merely crammed).  Sagacious,
with fine forecast, with a high ideal, and yet up to a certain
point a most tolerant temper, he was a fine specimen of the
Scottish gentleman.  His son tells that, as he was engaged
in work calculated to benefit the world and to save life, he
would not for long take out a patent for his inventions, and thus
lost immense sums.  I can well believe that: it seems quite
in keeping with my impressions of the man.  There was
nothing stolid or selfishly absorbed in him.  He bore the
marks of deep, true, honest feeling, true benevolence, and
open-handed generosity, and despite the son’s great
pen-craft, and inventive power, would have forgiven my saying
that sometimes I have had a doubt whether the father was not,
after all, the greater man of the two, though certainly not, like
the hero of In Memoriam, moulded “in colossal
calm.”

In theological matters, in which Thomas Stevenson had been
much and deeply exercised, he held very strong views, leading
decisively to ultra-Calvinism; but, as I myself could well
sympathise with such views, if I did not hold them, knowing well
the strange ways in which they had gone to form grand, if
sometimes sternly forbidding characters, there were no
cross-purposes as there might have been with some on that
subject.  And always I felt I had an original character and
a most interesting one to study.

This is another very characteristic letter to me from Davos
Platz:

“Chalet Buol,
Davos, Grisons,
Switzerland.  (No
date.)

“My dear Dr Japp,—You
must think me a forgetful rogue, as indeed I am; for I have but
now told my publisher to send you a copy of the Familiar
Studies.  However, I own I have delayed this letter till
I could send you the enclosed.  Remembering the night at
Braemar, when we visited the picture-gallery, I hoped they might
amuse you.

“You see we do some publishing hereaway.

“With kind regards, believe me, always yours
faithfully,

Robert Louis Stevenson.”

“I shall hope to see you in town in May.”

The enclosed was the second series of Moral Emblems, by
R. L. Stevenson, printed by Samuel Osbourne.  My answer to
this letter brought the following:

“Chalet-Buol, Davos,
April 1st, 1882.

“My dear Dr Japp,—A
good day to date this letter, which is, in fact, a confession of
incapacity.  During my wife’s wretched
illness—or I should say the worst of it, for she is not yet
rightly well—I somewhat lost my head, and entirely lost a
great quire of corrected proofs.  This is one of the
results: I hope there are none more serious.  I was never so
sick of any volume as I was of that; I was continually receiving
fresh proofs with fresh infinitesimal difficulties.  I was
ill; I did really fear, for my wife was worse than ill. 
Well, ’tis out now; and though I have already observed
several carelessnesses myself, and now here is another of your
finding—of which indeed, I ought to be ashamed—it
will only justify the sweeping humility of the preface.

“Symonds was actually dining with us when your letter
came, and I communicated your remarks, which pleased him. 
He is a far better and more interesting thing than his books.

“The elephant was my wife’s, so she is
proportionately elate you should have picked it out for praise
from a collection, let us add, so replete with the highest
qualities of art.

“My wicked carcass, as John Knox calls it, holds
together wonderfully.  In addition to many other things, and
a volume of travel, I find I have written since December ninety
Cornhill pp. of Magazine work—essays and
stories—40,000 words; and I am none the worse—I am
better.  I begin to hope I may, if not outlive this
wolverine upon my shoulders, at least carry him bravely like
Symonds or Alexander Pope.  I begin to take a pride in that
hope.

“I shall be much interested to see your criticisms: you
might perhaps send them on to me.  I believe you know that I
am not dangerous—one folly I have not—I am not touchy
under criticism.

“Sam and my wife both beg to be remembered, and Sam also
sends as a present a work of his own.—Yours very
sincerely,

Robert Louis Stevenson.”

As indicating the estimate of many of the good Edinburgh
people of Stevenson and the Stevensons that still held sway up to
so late a date as 1893, I will here extract two characteristic
passages from the letters of the friend and correspondent of
these days just referred to, and to whom I had sent a copy of the
Atalanta Magazine, with an article of mine on
Stevenson.

“If you can excuse the garrulity of age, I
can tell you one or two things about Louis Stevenson, his father
and even his grandfather, which you may work up some other day,
as you have so deftly embedded in the Atalanta article
that small remark on his acting.  Your paper is pleasant and
modest: most of R. L. Stevenson’s admirers are inclined to
lay it on far too thick.  That he is a genius we all admit;
but his genius, if fine, is limited.  For example, he cannot
paint (or at least he never has painted) a woman.  No more
could Fettes Douglas, skilful artist though he was in his own
special line, and I shall tell you a remark of Russel’s
thereon some day. [4]  There are women in his books, but
there is none of the beauty and subtlety of womanhood in
them.

“R. L. Stevenson I knew well as a lad and often met him
and talked with him.  He acted in private theatricals got up
by the late Professor Fleeming Jenkin.  But he had then, as
always, a pretty guid conceit o’ himsel’—which
his clique have done nothing to check.  His father and his
grandfather (I have danced with his mother before her marriage) I
knew better; but ‘the family theologian,’ as some of
R. L. Stevenson’s friends dabbed his father, was a very
touchy theologian, and denounced any one who in the least
differed from his extreme Calvinistic views.  I came under
his lash most unwittingly in this way myself.  But for this
twist, he was a good fellow—kind and hospitable—and a
really able man in his profession.  His father-in-law, R. L.
Stevenson’s maternal grandfather, was the Rev. Dr Balfour,
minister of Colinton—one of the finest-looking old men I
ever saw—tall, upright, and ruddy at eighty.  But he
was marvellously feeble as a preacher, and often said things that
were deliciously, unconsciously, unintentionally laughable, if
not witty.  We were near Colinton for some years; and Mr
Russell (of the Scotsman), who once attended the Parish
Church with us, was greatly tickled by Balfour discoursing on the
story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, remarking that Mrs
P—’s conduct was ‘highly
improper’!”

The estimate of R. L. Stevenson was not and could not be final
in this case, for Weir of Hermiston and Catriona
were yet unwritten, not to speak of others, but the passages
reflect a certain side of Edinburgh opinion, illustrating the old
Scripture doctrine that a prophet has honour everywhere but in
his own country.  And the passages themselves bear evidence
that I violate no confidence then, for they were given to me to
be worked into any after-effort I might make on Stevenson. 
My friend was a good and an acute critic who had done some
acceptable literary work in his day.

CHAPTER III—THE CHILD FATHER OF THE MAN

R. L. Stevenson was born on 13th November 1850, the very year
of the death of his grandfather, Robert Stevenson, whom he has so
finely celebrated.  As a mere child he gave token of his
character.  As soon as he could read, he was keen for books,
and, before very long, had read all the story-books he could lay
hands on; and, when the stock ran out, he would go and look in at
all the shop windows within reach, and try to piece out the
stories from the bits exposed in open pages and the woodcuts.

He had a nurse of very remarkable character—evidently a
paragon—who deeply influenced him and did much to form his
young mind—Alison Cunningham, who, in his juvenile lingo,
became “Cumy,” and who not only was never forgotten,
but to the end was treated as his “second
mother.”  In his dedication of his Child’s
Garden of Verses to her, he says:

“My second mother, my first wife,
The angel of my infant life.”

Her copy of Kidnapped was inscribed to her by the hand
of Stevenson, thus:

“To Cumy, from her
boy, the author.
Skerryvore, 18th July
1888.”

Skerryvore was the name of Stevenson’s Bournemouth home,
so named after one of the Stevenson lighthouses.  His first
volume, An Inland Voyage has this pretty dedication,
inscribed in a neat, small hand:

“My dear
Cumy,—If you had not taken so much trouble with me
all the years of my childhood, this little book would never have
been written.  Many a long night you sat up with me when I
was ill.  I wish I could hope, by way of return, to amuse a
single evening for you with my little book.  But whatever
you think of it, I know you will think kindly of

The Author.”

“Cumy” was perhaps the most influential teacher
Stevenson had.  What she and his mother taught took effect
and abode with him, which was hardly the case with any other of
his teachers.

“In contrast to Goethe,” says Mr
Baildon, “Stevenson was but little affected by his
relations to women, and, when this point is fully gone into, it
will probably be found that his mother and nurse in childhood,
and his wife and step-daughter in later life, are about the only
women who seriously influenced either his character or his
art.” (p. 32).

When Mr Kelman is celebrating Stevenson for the consistency
and continuity of his undogmatic religion, he is almost
throughout celebrating “Cumy” and her influence,
though unconsciously.  Here, again, we have an apt and yet
more striking illustration, after that of the good Lord
Shaftesbury and many others, of the deep and lasting effect a
good and earnest woman, of whom the world may never hear, may
have had upon a youngster of whom all the world shall hear. 
When Mr Kelman says that “the religious element in
Stevenson was not a thing of late growth, but an integral part
and vital interest of his life,” he but points us back to
the earlier religious influences to which he had been effectually
subject.  “His faith was not for himself alone, and
the phases of Christianity which it has asserted are peculiarly
suited to the spiritual needs of many in the present
time.”

We should not lay so much weight as Mr Kelman does on the mere
number of times “the Divine name” is found in
Stevenson’s writings, but there is something in such
confessions as the following to his father, when he was, amid
hardship and illness, in Paris in 1878:

“Still I believe in myself and my fellow-men
and the God who made us all. . . . I am lonely and sick and out
of heart.  Well, I still hope; I still believe; I still see
the good in the inch, and cling to it.  It is not much,
perhaps, but it is always something.”

Yes, “Cumy” was a very effective teacher, whose
influence and teaching long remained.  His other teachers,
however famous and highly gifted, did not attain to such success
with him.  And because of this non-success they blamed him,
as is usual.  He was fond of playing truant—declared,
indeed, that he was about as methodic a truant as ever could have
existed.  He much loved to go on long wanderings by himself
on the Pentland Hills and read about the Covenanters, and while
yet a youth of sixteen he wrote The Pentland
Rising—a pamphlet in size and a piece of fine
work—which was duly published, is now scarce, and fetches a
high price.  He had made himself thoroughly familiar with
all the odd old corners of Edinburgh—John Knox’s
haunts and so on, all which he has turned to account in essays,
descriptions and in stories—especially in
Catriona.  When a mere youth at school, as he tells
us himself, he had little or no desire to carry off prizes and do
just as other boys did; he was always wishing to observe, and to
see, and try things for himself—was, in fact, in the eyes
of schoolmasters and tutors something of an idler, with
splendid gifts which he would not rightly apply.  He was
applying them rightly, though not in their way.  It is not
only in his Apology for Idlers that this confession is
made, but elsewhere, as in his essay on A College
Magazine, where he says, “I was always busy on my own
private end, which was to learn to write.  I kept always two
books in my pocket, one to read and one to write in!”

When he went to College it was still the same—he tells
us in the funniest way how he managed to wheedle a certificate
for Greek out of Professor Blackie, though the Professor owned
“his face was not familiar to him”!  He fared
very differently when, afterwards his father, eager that he
should follow his profession, got him to enter the civil
engineering class under Professor Fleeming Jenkin.  He still
stuck to his old courses—wandering about, and, in sheltered
corners, writing in the open air, and was not present in class
more than a dozen times.  When the session was ended he went
up to try for a certificate from Fleeming Jenkin. 
“No, no, Mr Stevenson,” said the Professor; “I
might give it in a doubtful case, but yours is not doubtful: you
have not kept my classes.”  And the most
characteristic thing—honourable to both men—is to
come; for this was the beginning of a friendship which grew and
strengthened and is finally celebrated in the younger man’s
sketch of the elder.  He learned from Professor Fleeming
Jenkin, perhaps unconsciously, more of the humaniores,
than consciously he did of engineering.  A friend of mine,
who knew well both the Stevenson family and the Balfours, to
which R. L. Stevenson’s mother belonged, recalls, as we
have seen, his acting in the private theatricals that were got up
by the Professor, and adds, “He was then a very handsome
fellow, and looked splendidly as Sir Charles Pomander, and
essayed, not wholly without success, Sir Peter Teazle,”
which one can well believe, no less than that he acted such parts
splendidly as well as looked them.

Longman’s Magazine, immediately after his death,
published the following poem, which took a very pathetic touch
from the circumstances of its appearance—the more that,
while it imaginatively and finely commemorated these days of
truant wanderings, it showed the ruling passion for home and the
old haunts, strongly and vividly, even not unnigh to death:

“The tropics vanish, and meseems that I,
From Halkerside, from topmost Allermuir,
Or steep Caerketton, dreaming gaze again.
Far set in fields and woods, the town I see
Spring gallant from the shallows of her smoke,
Cragg’d, spired, and turreted, her virgin fort
Beflagg’d.  About, on seaward drooping hills,
New folds of city glitter.  Last, the Forth
Wheels ample waters set with sacred isles,
And populous Fife smokes with a score of towns,
There, on the sunny frontage of a hill,
Hard by the house of kings, repose the dead,
My dead, the ready and the strong of word.
Their works, the salt-encrusted, still survive;
The sea bombards their founded towers; the night
Thrills pierced with their strong lamps.  The artificers,
One after one, here in this grated cell,
Where the rain erases and the rust consumes,
Fell upon lasting silence.  Continents
And continental oceans intervene;
A sea uncharted, on a lampless isle,
Environs and confines their wandering child
In vain.  The voice of generations dead
Summons me, sitting distant, to arise,
My numerous footsteps nimbly to retrace,
And all mutation over, stretch me down
In that denoted city of the dead.”

CHAPTER IV—HEREDITY ILLUSTRATED

At first sight it would seem hard to trace any illustration of
the doctrine of heredity in the case of this master of
romance.  George Eliot’s dictum that we are, each one
of us, but an omnibus carrying down the traits of our ancestors,
does not appear at all to hold here.  This fanciful realist,
this näive-wistful humorist, this dreamy mystical casuist,
crossed by the innocent bohemian, this serious and genial
essayist, in whom the deep thought was hidden by the gracious
play of wit and phantasy, came, on the father’s side, of a
stock of what the world regarded as a quiet, ingenious, demure,
practical, home-keeping people.  In his rich colour,
originality, and graceful air, it is almost as though the bloom
of japonica came on a rich old orchard apple-tree, all out of
season too.  Those who go hard on heredity would say,
perhaps, that he was the result of some strange
back-stroke.  But, on closer examination, we need not go so
far.  His grandfather, Robert Stevenson, the great
lighthouse-builder, the man who reared the iron-bound pillar on
the destructive Bell Rock, and set life-saving lights there, was
very intent on his professional work, yet he had his ideal, and
romantic, and adventurous side.  In the delightful sketch
which his famous grandson gave of him, does he not tell of the
joy Robert Stevenson had on the annual voyage in the
Lighthouse Yacht—how it was looked forward to,
yearned for, and how, when he had Walter Scott on board, his fund
of story and reminiscence all through the tour never
failed—how Scott drew upon it in The Pirate and the
notes to The Pirate, and with what pride Robert Stevenson
preserved the lines Scott wrote in the lighthouse album at the
Bell Rock on that occasion:

“PHAROS LOQUITUR

“Far in the bosom of the deep
O’er these wild shelves my watch I keep,
A ruddy gem of changeful light
Bound on the dusky brow of night.
The seaman bids my lustre hail,
And scorns to strike his timorous sail.”

And how in 1850 the old man, drawing nigh unto death, was with
the utmost difficulty dissuaded from going the voyage once more,
and was found furtively in his room packing his portmanteau in
spite of the protests of all his family, and would have gone but
for the utter weakness of death.

His father was also a splendid engineer; was full of invention
and devoted to his profession, but he, too, was not without his
romances, and even vagaries.  He loved a story, was a fine
teller of stories, used to sit at night and spin the most
wondrous yarns, a man of much reserve, yet also of much power in
discourse, with an aptness and felicity in the use of
phrases—so much so, as his son tells, that on his deathbed,
when his power of speech was passing from him, and he
couldn’t articulate the right word, he was silent rather
than use the wrong one.  I shall never forget how in these
early morning walks at Braemar, finding me sympathetic, he unbent
with the air of a man who had unexpectedly found something he had
sought, and was fairly confidential.

On the mother’s side our author came of ministers. 
His maternal grandfather, the Rev. Dr Balfour of Colinton, was a
man of handsome presence, tall, venerable-looking, and not
without a mingled authority and humour of his own—no very
great preacher, I have heard, but would sometimes bring a smile
to the faces of his hearers by very naïve and original ways
of putting things.  R. L. Stevenson quaintly tells a story
of how his grandfather when he had physic to take, and was
indulged in a sweet afterwards, yet would not allow the child to
have a sweet because he had not had the physic.  A veritable
Calvinist in daily action—from him, no doubt, our subject
drew much of his interest in certain directions—John Knox,
Scottish history, the ’15 and the ’45, and no doubt
much that justifies the line “something of
shorter-catechist,” as applied by Henley to Stevenson among
very contrasted traits indeed.

But strange truly are the interblendings of race, and the way
in which traits of ancestors reappear, modifying and transforming
each other.  The gardener knows what can be done by grafts
and buddings; but more wonderful far than anything there, are the
mysterious blendings and outbursts of what is old and forgotten,
along with what is wholly new and strange, and all going to
produce often what we call sometimes eccentricity, and sometimes
originality and genius.

Mr J. F. George, in Scottish Notes and Queries, wrote
as follows on Stevenson’s inheritances and indebtedness to
certain of his ancestors:

“About 1650, James Balfour, one of the
Principal Clerks of the Court of Session, married Bridget,
daughter of Chalmers of Balbaithan, Keithhall, and that estate
was for some time in the name of Balfour.  His son, James
Balfour of Balbaithan, Merchant and Magistrate of Edinburgh, paid
poll-tax in 1696, but by 1699 the land had been sold.  This
was probably due to the fact that Balfour was one of the
Governors of the Darien Company.  His grandson, James
Balfour of Pilrig (1705-1795), sometime Professor of Moral
Philosophy in Edinburgh University, whose portrait is sketched in
Catriona, also made a Garioch [Aberdeenshire district]
marriage, his wife being Cecilia, fifth daughter of Sir John
Elphinstone, second baronet of Logie (Elphinstone) and Sheriff of
Aberdeen, by Mary, daughter of Sir Gilbert Elliot, first baronet
of Minto.

“Referring to the Minto descent, Stevenson claims to
have ‘shaken a spear in the Debatable Land and shouted the
slogan of the Elliots.’  He evidently knew little or
nothing of his relations on the Elphinstone side.  The Logie
Elphinstones were a cadet branch of Glack, an estate acquired by
Nicholas Elphinstone in 1499.  William Elphinstone, a
younger son of James of Glack, and Elizabeth Wood of Bonnyton,
married Margaret Forbes, and was father of Sir James Elphinstone,
Bart., of Logie, so created in 1701. . . .

“Stevenson would have been delighted to acknowledge his
relationship, remote though it was, to ‘the Wolf of
Badenoch,’ who burned Elgin Cathedral without the Earl of
Kildare’s excuse that he thought the Bishop was in it; and
to the Wolf’s son, the Victor of Harlaw [and] to his nephew
‘John O’Coull,’ Constable of France. . . . Also
among Tusitala’s kin may be noted, in addition to the later
Gordons of Gight, the Tiger Earl of Crawford, familiarly known as
‘Earl Beardie,’ the ‘Wicked Master’ of
the same line, who was fatally stabbed by a Dundee cobbler
‘for taking a stoup of drink from him’; Lady Jean
Lindsay, who ran away with ‘a common jockey with the
horn,’ and latterly became a beggar; David Lindsay, the
last Laird of Edzell [a lichtsome Lindsay fallen on evil days],
who ended his days as hostler at a Kirkwall inn, and
‘Mussel Mou’ed Charlie,’ the Jacobite
ballad-singer.

“Stevenson always believed that he had a strong
spiritual affinity to Robert Fergusson.  It is more than
probable that there was a distant maternal affinity as
well.  Margaret Forbes, the mother of Sir James Elphinstone,
the purchaser of Logie, has not been identified, but it is
probable she was of the branch of the Tolquhon Forbeses who
previously owned Logie.  Fergusson’s mother, Elizabeth
Forbes, was the daughter of a Kildrummy tacksman, who by constant
tradition is stated to have been of the house of Tolquhon. 
It would certainly be interesting if this suggested connection
could be proved.” [5]

“From his Highland ancestors,” says the
Quarterly Review, “Louis drew the strain of Celtic
melancholy with all its perils and possibilities, and its
kinship, to the mood of day-dreaming, which has flung over so
many of his pages now the vivid light wherein figures imagined
grew as real as flesh and blood, and yet, again, the ghostly,
strange, lonesome, and stinging mist under whose spell we see the
world bewitched, and every object quickens with a throb of
infectious terror.”

Here, as in many other cases, we see how the traits of
ancestry reappear and transform other strains, strangely the more
remote often being the strongest and most persistent and
wonderful.

“It is through his father, strange as it may
seem,” says Mr Baildon, “that Stevenson gets the
Celtic elements so marked in his person, character, and genius;
for his father’s pedigree runs back to the Highland clan
Macgregor, the kin of Rob Roy.  Stevenson thus drew in
Celtic strains from both sides—from the Balfours and the
Stevensons alike—and in his strange, dreamy, beautiful, and
often far-removed fancies we have the finest and most effective
witness of it.”

Mr William Archer, in his own characteristic way, has brought
the inheritances from the two sides of the house into more direct
contact and contrast in an article he wrote in The Daily
Chronicle on the appearance of the Letters to Family and
Friends.

“These letters show,” he says,
“that Stevenson’s was not one of those sunflower
temperaments which turn by instinct, not effort, towards the
light, and are, as Mr Francis Thompson puts it, ‘heartless
and happy, lackeying their god.’  The strains of his
heredity were very curiously, but very clearly, mingled.  It
may surprise some readers to find him speaking of ‘the
family evil, despondency,’ but he spoke with
knowledge.  He inherited from his father not only a stern
Scottish intentness on the moral aspect of life (‘I would
rise from the dead to preach’), but a marked disposition to
melancholy and hypochondria.  From his mother, on the other
hand, he derived, along with his physical frailty, a resolute and
cheery stoicism.  These two elements in his nature fought
many a hard fight, and the besieging forces from
without—ill-health, poverty, and at one time family
dissensions—were by no means without allies in the inner
citadel of his soul.  His spirit was courageous in the
truest sense of the word: by effort and conviction, not by
temperamental insensibility to fear.  It is clear that there
was a period in his life (and that before the worst of his bodily
ills came upon him) when he was often within measurable distance
of Carlylean gloom.  He was twenty-four when he wrote thus,
from Swanston, to Mrs Sitwell:

“‘It is warmer a bit; but my body is most
decrepit, and I can just manage to be cheery and tread down
hypochondria under foot by work.  I lead such a funny life,
utterly without interest or pleasure outside of my work: nothing,
indeed, but work all day long, except a short walk alone on the
cold hills, and meals, and a couple of pipes with my father in
the evening.  It is surprising how it suits me, and how
happy I keep.’

“This is the serenity which arises, not from the absence
of fuliginous elements in the character, but from a potent
smoke-consuming faculty, and an inflexible will to use it. 
Nine years later he thus admonishes his backsliding parent:

“‘My dear
Mother,—I give my father up.  I give him a
parable: that the Waverley novels are better reading for every
day than the tragic Life.  And he takes it back-side
foremost, and shakes his head, and is gloomier than ever. 
Tell him that I give him up.  I don’t want no such a
parent.  This is not the man for my money.  I do not
call that by the name of religion which fills a man with
bile.  I write him a whole letter, bidding him beware of
extremes, and telling him that his gloom is gallows-worthy; and I
get back an answer—.  Perish the thought of it.

“‘Here am I on the threshold of another year,
when, according to all human foresight, I should long ago have
been resolved into my elements: here am I, who you were persuaded
was born to disgrace you—and, I will do you the justice to
add, on no such insufficient grounds—no very burning
discredit when all is done; here am I married, and the marriage
recognised to be a blessing of the first order.  A1 at
Lloyd’s.  There is he, at his not first youth, able to
take more exercise than I at thirty-three, and gaining a
stone’s weight, a thing of which I am incapable. 
There are you; has the man no gratitude? . . .

“‘Even the Shorter Catechism, not the merriest
epitome of religion, and a work exactly as pious although not
quite so true as the multiplication table—even that
dry-as-dust epitome begins with a heroic note.  What is
man’s chief end?  Let him study that; and ask himself
if to refuse to enjoy God’s kindest gifts is in the spirit
indicated.’

“As may be judged from this half-playful, half-serious
remonstrance, Stevenson’s relation to his parents was
eminently human and beautiful.  The family dissensions above
alluded to belonged only to a short but painful period, when the
father could not reconcile himself to the discovery that the son
had ceased to accept the formulas of Scottish Calvinism.  In
the eyes of the older man such heterodoxy was for the moment
indistinguishable from atheism; but he soon arrived at a better
understanding of his son’s position.  Nothing appears
more unmistakably in these letters than the ingrained theism of
Stevenson’s way of thought.  The poet, the romancer
within him, revolted from the conception of formless force. 
A personal deity was a necessary character in the drama, as he
conceived it.  And his morality, though (or inasmuch as) it
dwelt more on positive kindness than on negative lawlessness,
was, as he often insisted, very much akin to the morality of the
New Testament.”

Anyway it is clear that much in the interminglings of blood we
can trace, may go to account for not a little in
Stevenson.  His peculiar interest in the enormities of
old-time feuds, the excesses, the jealousies, the queer
psychological puzzles, the desire to work on the outlying and
morbid, and even the unallowed and unhallowed, for purposes of
romance—the delight in dealing with revelations of
primitive feeling and the out-bursts of the mere natural man
always strangely checked and diverted by the uprise of other
tendencies to the dreamy, impalpable, vague, weird and
horrible.  There was the undoubted Celtic element in him
underlying what seemed foreign to it, the disregard of
conventionality in one phase, and the falling under it in
another—the reaction and the retreat from what had
attracted and interested him, and then the return upon it, as
with added zest because of the retreat.  The confessed
Hedonist, enjoying life and boasting of it just a little, and yet
the Puritan in him, as it were, all the time eyeing himself as
from some loophole of retreat, and then commenting on his own
behaviour as a Hedonist and Bohemian.  This clearly was not
what most struck Beerbohm Tree, during the time he was in close
contact with Stevenson, while arranging the production of Beau
Austin at the Haymarket Theatre, for he sees, or confesses to
seeing, only one side, and that the most assertive, and in a
sense, unreal one:

“Stevenson,” says Mr Tree,
“always seemed to me an epicure in life.  He was
always intent on extracting the last drop of honey from every
flower that came in his way.  He was absorbed in the
business of the moment, however trivial.  As a companion, he
was delightfully witty; as a personality, as much a creature of
romance as his own creations.”

This is simple, and it looks sincere; but it does not touch
’tother side, or hint at, not to say, solve the problem of
Stevenson’s personality.  Had he been the mere
Hedonist he could never have done the work he did.  Mr
Beerbohm Tree certainly did not there see far or all round.

Miss Simpson says:

“Mr Henley recalls him to Edinburgh folk as
he was and as the true Stevenson would have wished to be
known—a queer, inexplicable creature, his Celtic blood
showing like a vein of unknown metal in the stolid, steady rock
of his sure-founded Stevensonian pedigree.  His cousin and
model, ‘Bob’ Stevenson, the art critic, showed that
this foreign element came from the men who lit our guiding lights
for seamen, not from the gentle-blooded Balfours.

“Mr Henley is right in saying that the gifted boy had
not much humour.  When the joke was against himself he was
very thin-skinned and had a want of balance.  This made him
feel his honest father’s sensible remarks like the sting of
a whip.”

Miss Simpson then proceeds to say:

“The R. L. Stevenson of old Edinburgh days
was a conceited, egotistical youth, but a true and honest one: a
youth full of fire and sentiment, protesting he was
misunderstood, though he was not.  Posing as ‘Velvet
Coat’ among the slums, he did no good to himself.  He
had not the Dickens aptitude for depicting the ways of life of
his adopted friends.  When with refined judgment he wanted a
figure for a novel, he went back to the Bar he scorned in his
callow days and then drew in Weir of Hermiston.”

CHAPTER V—TRAVELS

His interest in engineering soon went—his mind full of
stories and fancies and human nature.  As he had told his
mother: he did not care about finding what was “the strain
on a bridge,” he wanted to know something of human
beings.

No doubt, much to the disappointment and grief of his father,
who wished him as an only son to carry on the traditions of the
family, though he had written two engineering essays of utmost
promise, the engineering was given up, and he consented to study
law.  He had already contributed to College Magazines, and
had had even a short spell of editing one; of one of these he has
given a racy account.  Very soon after his call to the Bar
articles and essays from his pen began to appear in
Macmillan’s, and later, more regularly in the
Cornhill.  Careful readers soon began to note here
the presence of a new force.  He had gone on the Inland
Voyage and an account of it was in hand; and had done that
tour in the Cevennes which he has described under the title
Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, with Modestine,
sometimes doubting which was the donkey, but on that tour a chill
caught either developed a germ of lung disease already present,
or produced it; and the results unfortunately remained.

He never practised at the Bar, though he tells facetiously of
his one brief.  He had chosen his own vocation, which was
literature, and the years which followed were, despite the
delicacy which showed itself, very busy years.  He produced
volume on volume.  He had written many stories which had
never seen the light, but, as he says, passed through the ordeal
of the fire by more or less circuitous ways.

By this time some trouble and cause for anxiety had arisen
about the lungs, and trials of various places had been
made.  Ordered South suggests the Mediterranean,
sunny Italy, the Riviera.  Then a sea-trip to America was
recommended and undertaken.  Unfortunately, he got worse
there, his original cause of trouble was complicated with others,
and the medical treatment given was stupid, and exaggerated some
of the symptoms instead of removing them, All along—up, at
all events, to the time of his settlement in
Samoa—Stevenson was more or less of an invalid.

Indeed, were I ever to write an essay on the art of wisely
“laying-to,” as the sailors say, I would point it by
a reference to R. L. Stevenson.  For there is a wise way of
“laying-to” that does not imply inaction, but
discreet, well-directed effort, against contrary winds and rough
seas, that is, amid obstacles and drawbacks, and even ill-health,
where passive and active may balance and give effect to each
other.  Stevenson was by native instinct and temperament a
rover—a lover of adventure, of strange by-ways, errant
tracts (as seen in his Inland Voyage and Travels with a
Donkey through the Cevennes—seen yet more, perhaps, in
a certain account of a voyage to America as a steerage
passenger), lofty mountain-tops, with stronger air, and strange
and novel surroundings.  He would fain, like Ulysses, be at
home in foreign lands, making acquaintance with outlying races,
with

         “Cities
of men,
And manners, climates, councils, governments:
Myself not least, but honoured of them all,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.”

If he could not move about as he would, he would invent, make
fancy serve him instead of experience.  We thus owe
something to the staying and restraining forces in him, and a
wise “laying-to”—for his works, which are, in
large part, finely-healthy, objective, and in almost everything
unlike the work of an invalid, yet, in some degree, were but the
devices to beguile the burdens of an invalid’s days. 
Instead of remaining in our climate, it might be, to lie listless
and helpless half the day, with no companion but his own thoughts
and fancies (not always so pleasant either, if, like
Frankenstein’s monster, or, better still like the imp in
the bottle in the Arabian Nights, you cannot, once for all
liberate them, and set them adrift on their own charges to visit
other people), he made a home in the sweeter air and more steady
climate of the South Pacific, where, under the Southern Cross, he
could safely and beneficially be as active as he would be
involuntarily idle at home, or work only under pressure of
hampering conditions.  That was surely an illustration of
the true “laying-to” with an unaffectedly brave,
bright resolution in it.

CHAPTER VI—SOME EARLIER LETTERS

Carlyle was wont to say that, next to a faithful portrait,
familiar letters were the best medium to reveal a man.  The
letters must have been written with no idea of being used for
this end, however—free, artless, the unstudied
self-revealings of mind and heart.  Now, these letters of R.
L. Stevenson, written to his friends in England, have a vast
value in this way—they reveal the man—reveal him in
his strength and his weakness—his ready gift in pleasing
and adapting himself to those with whom he corresponded, and his
great power at once of adapting himself to his circumstances and
of humorously rising superior to them.  When he was ill and
almost penniless in San Francisco, he could give Mr Colvin this
account of his daily routine:

“Any time between eight and half-past nine
in the morning a slender gentleman in an ulster, with a volume
buttoned into the breast of it, maybe observed leaving No. 608
Bush and descending Powell with an active step.  The
gentleman is R. L. Stevenson; the volume relates to Benjamin
Franklin, on whom he meditates one of his charming essays. 
He descends Powell, crosses Market, and descends in Sixth on a
branch of the original Pine Street Coffee-House, no less. . . .
He seats himself at a table covered with waxcloth, and a pampered
menial of High-Dutch extraction, and, indeed, as yet only
partially extracted, lays before him a cup of coffee, a roll, and
a pat of butter, all, to quote the deity, very good.  A
while ago, and R. L. Stevenson used to find the supply of butter
insufficient; but he has now learned the art to exactitude, and
butter and roll expire at the same moment.  For this
rejection he pays ten cents, or fivepence sterling (£0 0s.
5d.).

“Half an hour later, the inhabitants of Bush Street
observed the same slender gentleman armed, like George
Washington, with his little hatchet, splitting kindling, and
breaking coal for his fire.  He does this quasi-publicly
upon the window-sill; but this is not to be attributed to any
love of notoriety, though he is indeed vain of his prowess with
the hatchet (which he persists in calling an axe), and daily
surprised at the perpetuation of his fingers.  The reason is
this: That the sill is a strong supporting beam, and that blows
of the same emphasis in other parts of his room might knock the
entire shanty into hell.  Thenceforth, for from three hours,
he is engaged darkly with an ink-bottle.  Yet he is not
blacking his boots, for the only pair that he possesses are
innocent of lustre, and wear the natural hue of the material
turned up with caked and venerable slush.  The youngest
child of his landlady remarks several times a day, as this
strange occupant enters or quits the house, ‘Dere’s
de author.’  Can it be that this bright-haired
innocent has found the true clue to the mystery?  The being
in question is, at least, poor enough to belong to that
honourable craft.”

Here are a few letters belonging to the winter of 1887-88,
nearly all written from Saranac Lake, in the Adirondacks,
celebrated by Emerson, and now a most popular holiday resort in
the United States, and were originally published in
Scribner’s Magazine. . . “It should be said
that, after his long spell of weakness at Bournemouth, Stevenson
had gone West in search of health among the bleak hill
summits—‘on the Canadian border of New York State,
very unsettled and primitive and cold.’  He had made
the voyage in an ocean tramp, the Ludgate Hill, the sort
of craft which any person not a born child of the sea would shun
in horror.  Stevenson, however, had ‘the finest time
conceivable on board the “strange floating
menagerie.”’”  Thus he describes it in a
letter to Mr Henry James:

“Stallions and monkeys and matches made our
cargo; and the vast continent of these incongruities rolled the
while like a haystack; and the stallions stood hypnotised by the
motion, looking through the port at our dinner-table, and winked
when the crockery was broken; and the little monkeys stared at
each other in their cages, and were thrown overboard like little
bluish babies; and the big monkey, Jacko, scoured about the ship
and rested willingly in my arms, to the ruin of my clothing; and
the man of the stallions made a bower of the black tarpaulin, and
sat therein at the feet of a raddled divinity, like a picture on
a box of chocolates; and the other passengers, when they were not
sick, looked on and laughed.  Take all this picture, and
make it roll till the bell shall sound unexpected notes and the
fittings shall break loose in our stateroom, and you have the
voyage of the Ludgate Hill.  She arrived in the port
of New York without beer, porter, soda-water, curaçoa,
fresh meat, or fresh water; and yet we lived, and we regret
her.”

He discovered this that there is no joy in the Universe
comparable to life on a villainous ocean tramp, rolling through a
horrible sea in company with a cargo of cattle.

“I have got one good thing of my sea voyage;
it is proved the sea agrees heartily with me, and my mother likes
it; so if I get any better, or no worse, my mother will likely
hire a yacht for a month or so in the summer.  Good Lord!
what fun!  Wealth is only useful for two things: a yacht and
a string quartette.  For these two I will sell my
soul.  Except for these I hold that £700 a year is as
much as anybody can possibly want; and I have had more, so I
know, for the extra coins were of no use, excepting for illness,
which damns everything.  I was so happy on board that ship,
I could not have believed it possible; we had the beastliest
weather, and many discomforts; but the mere fact of its being a
tramp ship gave us many comforts.  We could cut about with
the men and officers, stay in the wheel-house, discuss all manner
of things, and really be a little at sea.  And truly there
is nothing else.  I had literally forgotten what happiness
was, and the full mind—full of external and physical
things, not full of cares and labours, and rot about a
fellow’s behaviour.  My heart literally sang; I truly
care for nothing so much as for that.

“To go ashore for your letters and hang about the pier
among the holiday yachtsmen—that’s fame, that’s
glory—and nobody can take it away.”

At Saranac Lake the Stevensons lived in a
“wind-beleaguered hill-top hat-box of a house,” which
suited the invalid, but, on the other hand, invalided his
wife.  Soon after getting there he plunged into The
Master of Ballantrae.

“No thought have I now apart from it, and I
have got along up to page ninety-two of the draught with great
interest.  It is to me a most seizing tale: there are some
fantastic elements, the most is a dead genuine human
problem—human tragedy, I should say rather.  It will
be about as long, I imagine, as Kidnapped. . . . I have
done most of the big work, the quarrel, duel between the
brothers, and the announcement of the death to Clementina and my
Lord—Clementina, Henry, and Mackellar (nicknamed
Squaretoes) are really very fine fellows; the Master is all I
know of the devil; I have known hints of him, in the world, but
always cowards: he is as bold as a lion, but with the same
deadly, causeless duplicity I have watched with so much surprise
in my two cowards.  ’Tis true, I saw a hint of the
same nature in another man who was not a coward; but he had other
things to attend to; the Master has nothing else but his
devilry.”

His wife grows seriously ill, and Stevenson has to turn to
household work.

“Lloyd and I get breakfast; I have now,
10.15, just got the dishes washed and the kitchen all clean, and
sit down to give you as much news as I have spirit for, after
such an engagement.  Glass is a thing that really breaks my
spirit; and I do not like to fail, and with glass I cannot reach
the work of my high calling—the artist’s.”

In the midst of such domestic tasks and entanglements he
writes The Master, and very characteristically gets
dissatisfied with the last parts, “which shame, perhaps
degrade, the beginning.”

Of Mr Kipling this is his judgment—in the year 1890:

“Kipling is by far the most promising young
man who has appeared since—ahem—I appeared.  He
amazes me by his precocity and various endowments.  But he
alarms me by his copiousness and haste.  He should shield
his fire with both hands, ‘and draw up all his strength and
sweetness in one ball.’  (‘Draw all his strength
and all his sweetness up into one ball’?  I cannot
remember Marvell’s words.)  So the critics have been
saying to me; but I was never capable of—and surely never
guilty of—such a debauch of production.  At this rate
his works will soon fill the habitable globe, and surely he was
armed for better conflicts than these succinct sketches and
flying leaves of verse?  I look on, I admire, I rejoice for
myself; but in a kind of ambition we all have for our tongue and
literature I am wounded.  If I had this man’s
fertility and courage, it seems to me I could heave a
pyramid.

“Well, we begin to be the old fogies now, and it was
high time something rose to take our places. 
Certainly Kipling has the gifts; the fairy godmothers were all
tipsy at his christening.  What will he do with
them?”

Of the rest of Stevenson’s career we cannot speak at
length, nor is it needful.  How in steady succession came
his triumphs: came, too, his trials from ill-health—how he
spent winters at Davos Platz, Bournemouth, and tried other places
in America; and how, at last, good fortune led him to the South
Pacific.  After many voyagings and wanderings among the
islands, he settled near Apia, in Samoa, early in 1890, cleared
some four hundred acres, and built a house; where, while he wrote
what delighted the English-speaking race, he took on himself the
defence of the natives against foreign interlopers, writing under
the title A Footnote to History, the most powerful
exposé of the mischief they had done and were doing
there.  He was the beloved of the natives, as he made
himself the friend of all with whom he came in contact. 
There, as at home, he worked—worked with the same
determination and in the enjoyment of better health.  The
obtaining idea with him, up to the end, as it had been from early
life, was a brave, resolute, cheerful endeavour to make the best
of it.

“I chose Samoa instead of Honolulu,” he told Mr W.
H. Trigg, who reports the talk in Cassells’
Magazine, “for the simple and eminently satisfactory
reason that it is less civilised.  Can you not conceive that
it is awful fun?”  His house was called
“Vailima,” which means Five Waters in the Samoan, and
indicates the number of streams that flow by the spot.

CHAPTER VII—THE VAILIMA LETTERS

The Vailima Letters, written to Mr Sidney Colvin and other
friends, are in their way delightful if not inimitable: and this,
in spite of the idea having occurred to him, that some use might
hereafter be made of these letters for publication
purposes.  There is, indeed, as little trace of any change
in the style through this as well could be—the utterly
familiar, easy, almost child-like flow remains, unmarred by
self-consciousness or tendency “to put it on.”

In June, 1892, Stevenson says:

“It came over me the other day suddenly that
this diary of mine to you would make good pickings after I am
dead, and a man could make some kind of a book out of it, without
much trouble.  So for God’s sake don’t lose
them, and they will prove a piece of provision for ‘my
floor old family,’ as Simelé calls it.”

But their great charm remains: they are as free and gracious
and serious and playful and informal as before. 
Stevenson’s traits of character are all here: his largeness
of heart, his delicacy, his sympathy, his fun, his pathos, his
boylike frolicsomeness, his fine courage, his love of the sea
(for he was by nature a sailor), his passion for action and
adventure despite his ill-health, his great patience with others
and fine adaptability to their temper (he says that he never gets
out of temper with those he has to do with), his unbounded,
big-hearted hopefulness, and fine perseverance in face of
difficulties.  What could be better than the way in which he
tells that in January, 1892, when he had a bout of influenza and
was dictating St Ives to his stepdaughter, Mrs Strong, he
was “reduced to dictating to her in the deaf-and-dumb
alphabet”?—and goes on:

“The amanuensis has her head quite turned,
and believes herself to be the author of this novel [and is to
some extent.—A.M.] and as the creature (!) has not been
wholly useless in the matter [I told you so!—A.M.] I
propose to foster her vanity by a little commemoration gift! . .
. I shall tell you on some other occasion, and when the A.M. is
out of hearing, how very much I propose to invest in this
testimonial; but I may as well inform you at once that I intend
it to be cheap, sir—damned cheap!  My idea of running
amanuenses is by praise, not pudding, flattery, and not
coins.”

Truly, a rare and rich nature which could thus draw sunshine
out of its trials!—which, by aid of the true
philosopher’s stone of cheerfulness and courage, could
transmute the heavy dust and clay to gold.

His interests are so wide that he is sometimes pulled in
different and conflicting directions, as in the contest between
his desire to aid Mataafa and the other chiefs, and his literary
work—between letters to the Times about Samoan
politics, and, say, David Balfour.  Here is a
characteristic bit in that strain:

“I have a good dose of the devil in my
pipestem atomy; I have had my little holiday outing in my kick at
The Young Chevalier, and I guess I can settle to David
Balfour, to-morrow or Friday like a little man.  I
wonder if any one had ever more energy upon so little
strength?  I know there is a frost; . . . but I mean to
break that frost inside two years, and pull off a big success,
and Vanity whispers in my ear that I have the strength.  If
I haven’t, whistle owre the lave o’t!  I can do
without glory, and perhaps the time is not far off when I can do
without corn.  It is a time coming soon enough, anyway; and
I have endured some two and forty years without public shame, and
had a good time as I did it.  If only I could secure a
violent death, what a fine success!  I wish to die in my
boots; no more Land of Counterpane for me.  To be drowned,
to be shot, to be thrown from a horse—ay, to be hanged,
rather than pass again through that slow dissolution.”

He would not consent to act the invalid unless the spring ran
down altogether; was keen for exercise and for mixing among
men—his native servants if no others were near by. 
Here is a bit of confession and casuistry quite à
la Stevenson:

“To come down covered with mud and drenched
with sweat and rain after some hours in the bush, change, rub
down, and take a chair in the verandah, is to taste a quiet
conscience.  And the strange thing that I mark is this: If I
go out and make sixpence, bossing my labourers and plying the
cutlass or the spade, idiot conscience applauds me; if I sit in
the house and make twenty pounds, idiot conscience wails over my
neglect and the day wasted.”

His relish for companionship is indeed strong.  At one
place he says:

“God knows I don’t care who I chum
with perhaps I like sailors best, but to go round and sue and
sneak to keep a crowd together—never!”

If Stevenson’s natural bent was to be an explorer, a
mountain-climber, or a sailor—to sail wide seas, or to
range on mountain-tops to gain free and extensive views—yet
he inclines well to farmer work, and indeed, has to confess it
has a rare attraction for him.

“I went crazy over outdoor work,” he
says at one place, “and had at last to confine myself to
the house, or literature must have gone by the board. 
Nothing is so interesting as weeding, clearing, and
path-making: the oversight of labourers becomes a disease. 
It is quite an effort not to drop into the farmer; and it does
make you feel so well.”

The odd ways of these Samoans, their pride of position, their
vices, their virtues, their vanities, their small thefts, their
tricks, their delightful insouciance sometimes, all amused
him.  He found in them a fine field of study and
observation—a source of fun and fund of humanity—as
this bit about the theft of some piglings will sufficiently
prove:

“Last night three piglings were stolen from
one of our pig-pens.  The great Lafaele appeared to my wife
uneasy, so she engaged him in conversation on the subject, and
played upon him the following engaging trick: You advance your
two forefingers towards the sitter’s eyes; he closes them,
whereupon you substitute (on his eyelids) the fore and middle
fingers of the left hand, and with your right (which he supposes
engaged) you tap him on the head and back.  When you let him
open his eyes, he sees you withdrawing the two forefingers. 
‘What that?’ asked Lafaele.  ‘My
devil,’ says Fanny.  ‘I wake um, my devil. 
All right now.  He go catch the man that catch my
pig.’  About an hour afterwards Lafaele came for
further particulars.  ‘Oh, all right,’ my wife
says.  ‘By-and-by that man be sleep, devil go sleep
same place.  By-and-by that man plenty sick.  I no
care.  What for he take my pig?’  Lafaele cares
plenty; I don’t think he is the man, though he may be; but
he knows him, and most likely will eat some of that pig
to-night.  He will not eat with relish.’”

Yet in spite of this R. L. Stevenson declares that:

“They are a perfectly honest people: nothing
of value has ever been taken from our house, where doors and
windows are always wide open; and upon one occasion when white
ants attacked the silver chest, the whole of my family treasure
lay spread upon the floor of the hall for two days
unguarded.”

Here is a bit on a work of peace, a reflection on a
day’s weeding at Vailima—in its way almost as
touching as any:

“I wonder if any one had ever the same
attitude to Nature as I hold, and have held for so long? 
This business fascinates me like a tune or a passion; yet all the
while I thrill with a strong distaste.  The horror of the
thing, objective and subjective, is always present to my mind;
the horror of creeping things, a superstitious horror of the void
and the powers about me, the horror of my own devastation and
continual murders.  The life of the plants comes through my
finger-tips, their struggles go to my heart like
supplications.  I feel myself blood-boltered; then I look
back on my cleared grass, and count myself an ally in a fair
quarrel, and make stout my heart.”

Here, again, is the way in which he celebrates an act of
friendly kindness on the part of Mr Gosse:

“My dear
Gosse,—Your letter was to me such a bright spot that
I answer it right away to the prejudice of other correspondents
or—dants (don’t know how to spell it) who have prior
claims. . . . It is the history of our kindnesses that alone
makes this world tolerable.  If it were not for that, for
the effect of kind words, kind looks, kind letters, multiplying,
spreading, making one happy through another and bringing forth
benefits, some thirty, some fifty, some a thousandfold, I should
be tempted to think our life a practical jest in the worst
possible spirit.  So your four pages have confirmed my
philosophy as well as consoled my heart in these ill
hours.”

CHAPTER VIII—WORK OF LATER YEARS

Mr Hammerton, in his Stevensoniana (pp. 323-4), has
given the humorous inscriptions on the volumes of his works which
Stevenson presented to Dr Trudeau, who attended him when he was
in Saranac in 1887-88—very characteristic in every way, and
showing fully Stevenson’s fine appreciation of any
attention or service.  On the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
volume he wrote:

“Trudeau was all the winter at my side:
I never saw the nose of Mr Hyde.”

And on Kidnapped is this:

“Here is the one sound page of all my
writing,
The one I’m proud of and that I delight in.”

Stevenson was exquisite in this class of efforts, and were
they all collected they would form indeed, a fine supplement and
illustration of the leading lesson of his essays—the true
art of pleasing others, and of truly pleasing one’s self at
the same time.  To my thinking the finest of all in this
line is the legal (?) deed by which he conveyed his birthday to
little Miss Annie Ide, the daughter of Mr H. C. Ide, a well-known
American, who was for several years a resident of Upolo, in
Samoa, first as Land Commissioner, and later as Chief Justice
under the joint appointment of England, Germany, and the United
States.  While living at Apia, Mr Ide and his family were
very intimate with the family of R. L. Stevenson.  Little
Annie was a special pet and protégé of Stevenson
and his wife.  After the return of the Ides to their
American home, Stevenson “deeded” to Annie his
birthday in the following unique document:

I, Robert Louis
Stevenson, advocate of the Scots Bar, author of The
Master of Ballantrae and Moral Emblems, civil
engineer, sole owner and patentee of the palace and plantation
known as Vailima, in the island of Upolo, Samoa, a British
subject, being in sound mind, and pretty well, I thank you, in
mind and body;

In consideration that Miss Annie H. Ide, daughter of H. C.
Ide, in the town of Saint Johnsbury, in the County of Caledonia,
in the State of Vermont, United States of America, was born, out
of all reason, upon Christmas Day, and is, therefore, out of all
justice, denied the consolation and profit of a proper
birthday;

And considering that I, the said Robert Louis Stevenson, have
attained the age when we never mention it, and that I have now no
further use for a birthday of any description;

And in consideration that I have met H. C. Ide, the father of
the said Annie H. Ide, and found him as white a land commissioner
as I require, I have transferred, and do hereby transfer, to the
said Annie H. Ide, all and whole of my rights and privileges in
the 13th day of November, formerly my birthday, now, hereby and
henceforth, the birthday of the said Annie H. Ide, to have, hold,
exercise, and enjoy the same in the customary manner, by the
sporting of fine raiment, eating of rich meats, and receipt of
gifts, compliments, and copies of verse, according to the manner
of our ancestors;

And I direct the said Annie H. Ide to add to the said name of
Annie H. Ide the name of Louisa—at least in
private—and I charge her to use my said birthday with
moderation and humanity, et tamquam bona filia familias,
the said birthday not being so young as it once was and having
carried me in a very satisfactory manner since I can
remember;

And in case the said Annie H. Ide shall neglect or contravene
either of the above conditions, I hereby revoke the donation and
transfer my rights in the said birthday to the President of the
United States of America for the time being.

In witness whereof I have hereto set my hand and seal this
19th day of June, in the year of grace eighteen hundred and
ninety-one.

Robert Louis
Stevenson. [Seal.]

Witness, Lloyd Osbourne.

Witness, Harold Watts.

He died in Samoa in December 1894—not from phthisis or
anything directly connected with it, but from the bursting of a
blood-vessel and suffusion of blood on the brain.  He had up
to the moment almost of his sudden and unexpected death been busy
on Weir of Hermiston and St Ives, which he left
unfinished—the latter having been brought to a conclusion
by Mr Quiller-Couch.

CHAPTER IX—SOME CHARACTERISTICS

In Stevenson we lost one of the most powerful writers of our
day, as well as the most varied in theme and style.  When I
use the word “powerful,” I do not mean merely the
producing of the most striking or sensational results, nor the
facility of weaving a fascinating or blood-curdling plot; I mean
the writer who seemed always to have most in reserve—a
secret fund of power and fascination which always pointed beyond
the printed page, and set before the attentive and careful reader
a strange but fascinating personality.  Other authors
have done that in measure.  There was Hawthorne, behind
whose writings there is always the wistful, cold, far-withdrawn
spectator of human nature—eerie, inquisitive, and, I had
almost said, inquisitorial—a little bloodless, eerie,
weird, and cobwebby.  There was Dr Wendell Holmes, with his
problems of heredity, of race-mixture and weird inoculation, as
in Elsie Venner and The Guardian Angel, and there
were Poe and Charles Whitehead.  Stevenson, in a few of his
writings—in one of the Merry Men chapters and in
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and, to some extent, in The
Master of Ballantrae—showed that he could enter on the
obscure and, in a sense, weird and metaphysical elements in human
life; though always there was, too, a touch at least of gloomy
suggestion, from which, as it seemed, he could not there wholly
escape.  But always, too, there was a touch that suggests
the universal.

Even in the stories that would be classed as those of incident
and adventure merely, Treasure Island, Kidnapped,
and the rest, there is a sense as of some unaffected but fine
symbolism that somehow touches something of possibility in
yourself as you read.  The simplest narrative from his hand
proclaimed itself a deep study in human nature—its motives
tendencies, and possibilities.  In these stories there is
promise at once of the most realistic imagination, the most
fantastic romance, keen insights into some sides of human nature,
and weird fancies, as well as the most delicate and dainty
pictures of character.  And this is precisely what we
have—always with a vein of the finest autobiography—a
kind of select and indirect self-revelation—often with a
touch of quaintness, a subdued humour, and sweet-blooded vagary,
if we may be allowed the word, which make you feel towards the
writer as towards a friend.  He was too much an artist to
overdo this, and his strength lies there, that generally he
suggests and turns away at the right point, with a smile, as you
ask for more.  Look how he sets, half slyly, these
words into the mouth of David Balfour on his first meeting with
Catriona in one of the steep wynds or closes off the High Street
of Edinburgh:

“There is no greater wonder than the way the
face of a young woman fits in a man’s mind, and stays
there, and he never could tell you why: it just seems it was the
thing he wanted.”

Take this alongside of his remark made to his mother while
still a youth—“that he did not care to understand the
strain on a bridge” (when he tried to study engineering);
what he wanted was something with human nature in it.  His
style, in his essays, etc., where he writes in his own person, is
most polished, full of phrases finely drawn; when he speaks
through others, as in Kidnapped and David Balfour,
it is still fine and effective, and generally it is fairly true
to the character, with cunning glimpses, nevertheless, of his own
temper and feeling too.  He makes us feel his confidants and
friends, as has been said.  One could almost construct a
biography from his essays and his novels—the one would give
us the facts of his life suffused with fancy and ideal colour,
humour and fine observation not wanting; the other would give us
the history of his mental and moral being and development, and of
the traits and determinations which he drew from along a
lengthened line of progenitors.  How characteristic it is of
him—a man who for so many years suffered as an
invalid—that he should lay it down that the two great
virtues, including all others, were cheerfulness and delight in
labour.

One writer has very well said on this feature in
Stevenson:

“Other authors have struggled bravely
against physical weakness, but their work has not usually been of
a creative order, dependent for its success on high animal
spirits.  They have written histories, essays, contemplative
or didactic poems, works which may more or less be regarded as
‘dull narcotics numbing pain.’  But who, in so
fragile a frame as Robert Louis Stevenson’s, has retained
such indomitable elasticity, such fertility of invention, such
unflagging energy, not merely to collect and arrange, but to
project and body forth?  Has any true ‘maker’
been such an incessant sufferer?  From his childhood, as he
himself said apropos of the Child’s Garden, he could
‘speak with less authority of gardens than of that other
“land of counterpane.”’  There were,
indeed, a few years of adolescence during which his health was
tolerable, but they were years of apprenticeship to life and art
(‘pioching,’ as he called it), not of serious
production.  Though he was a precocious child, his genius
ripened slowly, and it was just reaching maturity when the
‘wolverine,’ as he called his disease, fixed its
fangs in his flesh.  From that time forward not only did he
live with death at his elbow in an almost literal sense (he used
to carry his left arm in a sling lest a too sudden movement
should bring on a hæmorrhage), but he had ever-recurring
intervals of weeks and months during which he was totally unfit
for work; while even at the best of times he had to husband his
strength most jealously.  Add to all this that he was a slow
and laborious writer, who would take more pains with a phrase
than Scott with a chapter—then look at the stately shelf of
his works, brimful of impulse, initiative, and the joy of life,
and say whether it be an exaggeration to call his tenacity and
fortitude unique!”

Samoa, with its fine climate, prolonged his life—we had
fain hoped that in that air he found so favourable he might have
lived for many years, to add to the precious stock of innocent
delight he has given to the world—to do yet more and
greater.  It was not to be.  They buried him, with full
native honours as to a chief, on the top of Vaea mountain, 1300
feet high—a road for the coffin to pass being cut through
the woods on the slopes of the hill.  There he has a
resting-place not all unfit—for he sought the pure and
clearer air on the heights from whence there are widest
prospects; yet not in the spot he would have chosen—for his
heart was at home, and not very long before his death he sang,
surely with pathetic reference now:

“Spring shall come, come again, calling up
the moorfowl,
Spring shall bring the sun and rain, bring the bees and
flowers,
Red shall the heather bloom over hill and valley,
Soft flow the stream thro’ the even-flowing hours;
Fair the day shine, as it shone upon my childhood—
   Fair shine the day on the house with open door;
Birds come and cry there, and twitter in the chimney—
   But I go for ever and come again no more.”

CHAPTER X—A SAMOAN MEMORIAL OF R. L. STEVENSON

A few weeks after his death, the mail from Samoa, brought to
Stevenson’s friends, myself among the number, a precious,
if pathetic, memorial of the master.  It is in the form of
“A Letter to Mr Stevenson’s Friends,” by his
stepson, Mr Lloyd Osbourne, and bears the motto from Walt
Whitman, “I have been waiting for you these many
years.  Give me your hand and welcome.”  Mr
Osbourne gives a full account of the last hours.

“He wrote hard all that morning of the last
day; his half-finished book, Hermiston, he judged the best
he had ever written, and the sense of successful effort made him
buoyant and happy as nothing else could.  In the afternoon
the mail fell to be answered—not business correspondence,
for this was left till later—but replies to the long,
kindly letters of distant friends received but two days since,
and still bright in memory.  At sunset he came downstairs;
rallied his wife about the forebodings she could not shake off;
talked of a lecturing tour to America that he was eager to make,
‘as he was now so well’; and played a game of cards
with her to drive away her melancholy.  He said he was
hungry; begged her assistance to help him make a salad for the
evening meal; and, to enhance the little feast he brought up a
bottle of old Burgundy from the cellar.  He was helping his
wife on the verandah, and gaily talking, when suddenly he put
both hands to his head and cried out, ‘What’s
that?’  Then he asked quickly, ‘Do I look
strange?’  Even as he did so he fell on his knees
beside her.  He was helped into the great hall, between his
wife and his body-servant, Sosimo, losing consciousness instantly
as he lay back in the armchair that had once been his
grandfather’s.  Little time was lost in bringing the
doctors—Anderson of the man-of-war, and his friend, Dr
Funk.  They looked at him and shook their heads; they
laboured strenuously, and left nothing undone.  But he had
passed the bounds of human skill.  He had grown so well and
strong, that his wasted lungs were unable to bear the stress of
returning health.”

Then ’tis told how the Rev. Mr Clarke came and prayed by
him; and how, soon after, the chiefs were summoned, and came,
bringing their fine mats, which, laid on the body, almost hid the
Union jack in which it had been wrapped.  One of the old
Mataafa chiefs, who had been in prison, and who had been one of
those who worked on the making of the “Road of the Loving
Heart” (the road of gratitude which the chiefs had made up
to Mr Stevenson’s house as a mark of their appreciation of
his efforts on their behalf), came and crouched beside the body
and said:

“I am only a poor Samoan, and
ignorant.  Others are rich, and can give Tusitala [6] the parting presents of rich, fine mats;
I am poor, and can give nothing this last day he receives his
friends.  Yet I am not afraid to come and look the last time
in my friend’s face, never to see him more till we meet
with God.  Behold!  Tusitala is dead; Mataafa is also
dead.  These two great friends have been taken by God. 
When Mataafa was taken, who was our support but Tusitala? 
We were in prison, and he cared for us.  We were sick, and
he made us well.  We were hungry, and he fed us.  The
day was no longer than his kindness.  You are great people,
and full of love.  Yet who among you is so great as
Tusitala?  What is your love to his love?  Our clan was
Mataafa’s clan, for whom I speak this day; therein was
Tusitala also.  We mourn them both.”

A select company of Samoans would not be deterred, and watched
by the body all night, chanting songs, with bits of Catholic
prayers; and in the morning the work began of clearing a path
through the wood on the hill to the spot on the crown where Mr
Stevenson had expressed a wish to be buried.  The following
prayer, which Mr Stevenson had written and read aloud to his
family only the night before, was read by Mr Clarke in the
service:

“We beseech thee, Lord, to behold us with
favour, folk of many families and nations, gathered together in
the peace of this roof; weak men and women, subsisting under the
covert of Thy patience.  Be patient still; suffer us yet a
while longer—with our broken purposes of good, with our
idle endeavours against evil—suffer us a while longer to
endure, and (if it may be) help us to do better.  Bless to
us our extraordinary mercies; if the day come when these must be
taken, have us play the man under affliction.  Be with our
friends; be with ourselves.  Go with each of us to rest: if
any awake, temper to them the dark hours of watching; and when
the day returns to us, our Sun and Comforter, call us up with
morning faces and with morning hearts—eager to
labour—eager to be happy, if happiness shall be our
portion; and if the day be marked for sorrow, strong to endure
it.

“We thank Thee and praise Thee, and in the words of Him
to whom this day is sacred, close our oblations.”

Mr Bazzet M. Haggard, H.B.M., Land-Commissioner, tells, by way
of reminiscence, the story of “The Road of Good
Heart,” how it came to be built, and of the great feast Mr
Stevenson gave at the close of the work, at which, in the course
of his speech, he said:

“You are all aware in some degree of what
has happened.  You know those chiefs to have been prisoners;
you perhaps know that during the term of their confinement I had
it in my power to do them certain favours.  One thing some
of you cannot know, that they were immediately repaid by
answering attentions.  They were liberated by the new
Administration. . . .  As soon as they were free
men—owing no man anything—instead of going home to
their own places and families, they came to me.  They
offered to do this work (to make this road) for me as a free
gift, without hire, without supplies, and I was tempted at first
to refuse their offer.  I knew the country to be poor; I
knew famine threatening; I knew their families long disorganised
for want of supervision.  Yet I accepted, because I thought
the lesson of that road might be more useful to Samoa than a
thousand bread-fruit trees, and because to myself it was an
exquisite pleasure to receive that which was so handsomely
offered.  It is now done; you have trod it to-day in coming
hither.  It has been made for me by chiefs; some of them
old, some sick, all newly delivered from a harassing confinement,
and in spite of weather unusually hot and insalubrious.  I
have seen these chiefs labour valiantly with their own hands upon
the work, and I have set up over it, now that it is finished the
name of ‘The Road of Gratitude’ (the road of loving
hearts), and the names of those that built it.  ‘In
perpetuam memoriam,’ we say, and speak idly.  At
least, as long as my own life shall be spared it shall be here
perpetuated; partly for my pleasure and in my gratitude; partly
for others continually to publish the lesson of this
road.”

And turning to the chiefs, Mr Stevenson said:

“I will tell you, chiefs, that when I saw
you working on that road, my heart grew warm; not with gratitude
only, but with hope.  It seemed to me that I read the
promise of something good for Samoa; it seemed to me as I looked
at you that you were a company of warriors in a battle, fighting
for the defence of our common country against all
aggression.  For there is a time to fight and a time to
dig.  You Samoans may fight, you may conquer twenty times,
and thirty times, and all will be in vain.  There is but one
way to defend Samoa.  Hear it, before it is too late. 
It is to make roads and gardens, and care for your trees, and
sell their produce wisely; and, in one word, to occupy and use
your country.  If you do not, others will. . . .

“I love Samoa and her people.  I love the
land.  I have chosen it to be my home while I live, and my
grave after I am dead, and I love the people, and have chosen
them to be my people, to live and die with.  And I see that
the day is come now of the great battle; of the great and the
last opportunity by which it shall be decided whether you are to
pass away like those other races of which I have been speaking,
or to stand fast and have your children living on and honouring
your memory in the land you received of your fathers.”

Mr James H. Mulligan, U.S. Consul, told of the feast of
Thanksgiving Day on the 29th November prior to Mr
Stevenson’s death, and how at great pains he had procured
for it the necessary turkey, and how Mrs Stevenson had found a
fair substitute for the pudding.  In the course of his
speech in reply to an unexpected proposal of “The
Host,” Mr Stevenson said:

“There on my right sits she who has but
lately from our own loved native land come back to me—she
to whom, with no lessening of affection to those others to whom I
cling, I love better than all the world besides—my
mother.  From the opposite end of the table, my wife, who
has been all in all to me, when the days were very dark, looks
to-night into my eyes—while we have both grown a bit
older—with undiminished and undiminishing affection.

“Childless, yet on either side of me sits that good
woman, my daughter, and the stalwart man, my son, and both have
been and are more than son and daughter to me, and have brought
into my life mirth and beauty.  Nor is this all.  There
sits the bright boy dear to my heart, full of the flow and the
spirits of boyhood, so that I can even know that for a time at
least we have still the voice of a child in the house.”

Mr A. W. Mackay gives an account of the funeral and a
description of the burial-place, ending:

“Tofa Tusitala!  Sleep peacefully! on
thy mountain-top, alone in Nature’s sanctity, where the
wooddove’s note, the moaning of the waves as they break
unceasingly on the distant reef, and the sighing of the winds in
the distant tavai trees chant their requiem.”

The Rev. Mr Clarke tells of the constant and active interest
Mr Stevenson took in the missionaries and their work, often
aiding them by his advice and fine insight into the character of
the natives; and a translation follows of a dirge by one of the
chiefs, so fine that we must give it:

I.

“Listen, O this world, as I tell of the disaster
That befell in the late afternoon;
That broke like a wave of the sea
Suddenly and swiftly, blinding our eyes.
Alas for Loia who speaks tears in his voice!

Refrain—Groan and weep, O my heart, in its
sorrow.
Alas for Tusitala, who rests in the forest!
Aimlessly we wait, and sorrowing.  Will he again return?
Lament, O Vailima, waiting and ever waiting!
Let us search and inquire of the captain of ships,
‘Be not angry, but has not Tusitala come?’

II.

“Teuila, sorrowing one, come thou hither!
Prepare me a letter, and I will carry it.
Let her Majesty Victoria be told
That Tusitala, the loving one, has been taken hence.

Refrain—Groan and weep, O my heart, etc.,
etc.

III.

“Alas! my heart weeps with anxious grief
As I think of the days before us:
Of the white men gathering for the Christmas assembly!
Alas for Aolele! left in her loneliness,
And the men of Vailima, who weep together
Their leader—their leader being taken.

Refrain—Groan and weep, O my heart, etc.,
etc.

IV.

“Alas! O my heart! it weeps unceasingly
When I think of his illness
Coming upon him with fatal swiftness.
Would that it waited a glance or a word from him,
Or some token, some token from us of our love.

Refrain—Groan and weep, O my heart, etc.,
etc.

V.

“Grieve, O my heart!  I cannot bear to look on
All the chiefs who are there now assembling:
Alas, Tusitala! Thou art not here!
I look hither and thither in vain for thee.

Refrain—Groan and weep, O my heart, etc.,
etc.”

And the little booklet closes with Mr Stevenson’s own
lines:

“REQUIEM.

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie;
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
‘Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea;
And the hunter home from the hill.’”

Every touch tells here was a man, with heart and head, with
soul and mind intent on the loftiest things; simple, great,

“Like one of the simple great ones gone
For ever and ever by.

His character towered after all far above his books; great and
beautiful though they were.  Ready for friendship; from all
meanness free.  So, too, the Samoans felt.  This,
surely, was what Goethe meant when he wrote:

“The clear head and stout heart,
However far they roam,
Yet in every truth have part,
Are everywhere at home.”

His manliness, his width of sympathy, his practicality, his
range of interests were in nothing more seen than in his
contributions to the history of Samoa, as specially exhibited in
A Footnote to History and his letters to the
Times.  He was, on this side, in no sense a dreamer,
but a man of acute observation and quick eye for passing events
and the characters that were in them with sympathy equal to his
discernments.  His portraits of certain Germans and others
in these writings, and his power of tracing effects to remote and
underlying causes, show sufficiently what he might have done in
the field of history, had not higher voices called him.  His
adaptation to the life in Samoa, and his assumption of the
semi-patriarchal character in his own sphere there, were only
tokens of the presence of the same traits as have just been dwelt
on.

CHAPTER XI—MISS STUBBS’ RECORD OF A
PILGRIMAGE

Mrs Strong, in her chapter of Table Talk in Memories of
Vailima, tells a story of the natives’ love for
Stevenson.  “The other day the cook was away,”
she writes, “and Louis, who was busy writing, took his
meals in his room.  Knowing there was no one to cook his
lunch, he told Sosimo to bring him some bread and cheese. 
To his surprise he was served with an excellent meal—an
omelette, a good salad, and perfect coffee.  ‘Who
cooked this?’ asked Louis in Samoan.  ‘I
did,’ said Sosimo.  ‘Well,’ said Louis,
‘great is your wisdom.’  Sosimo bowed and
corrected him—‘Great is my love!’”

Miss Stubbs, in her Stevenson’s Shrine; the
Record of a Pilgrimage, illustrates the same devotion. 
On the top of Mount Vaea, she writes, is the massive sarcophagus,
“not an ideal structure by any means, not even beautiful,
and yet in its massive ruggedness it somehow suited the man and
the place.”

“The wind sighed softly in the branches of the
‘Tavau’ trees, from out the green recesses of the
‘Toi’ came the plaintive coo of the
wood-pigeon.  In and out of the branches of the magnificent
‘Fau’ tree, which overhangs the grave, a king-fisher,
sea-blue, iridescent, flitted to and fro, whilst a scarlet
hibiscus, in full flower, showed up royally against the gray
lichened cement.  All around was light and life and colour,
and I said to myself, ‘He is made one with nature’;
he is now, body and soul and spirit, commingled with the
loveliness around.  He who longed in life to scale the
height, he who attained his wish only in death, has become in
himself a parable of fulfilment.  No need now for that
heart-sick cry:—

“‘Sing me a song of a lad that is
gone,
Say, could that lad be I?’

No need now for the despairing finality of:

“‘I have trod the upward and the
downward slope,
I have endured and done in the days of yore,
I have longed for all, and bid farewell to hope,
And I have lived, and loved, and closed the door.’

“Death has set his seal of peace on the unequal conflict
of mind and matter; the All-Mother has gathered him to
herself.

“In years to come, when his grave is perchance
forgotten, a rugged ruin, home of the lizard and the bat,
Tusitala—the story-teller—‘the man with a heart
of gold’ (as I so often heard him designated in the
Islands), will live, when it may be his tales have ceased to
interest, in the tender remembrance of those whose lives he
beautified, and whose hearts he warmed into gratitude.”

The chiefs have prohibited the use of firearms or other
weapons on Mount Vaea, “in order that the birds may live
there undisturbed and unafraid, and build their nests in the
trees around Tusitala’s grave.”

Miss Stubbs has many records of the impression produced on
those he came in contact with in Samoa—white men and women
as well as natives.  She met a certain Austrian Count, who
adored Stevenson’s memory.  Over his camp bed was a
framed photograph of R. L. Stevenson.

“So,” he said, “I keep him
there, for he was my saviour, and I wish ‘good-night’
and ‘good-morning,’ every day, both to himself and to
his old home.”  The Count then told us that when he
was stopping at Vailima he used to have his bath daily on the
verandah below his room.  One lovely morning he got up very
early, got into the bath, and splashed and sang, feeling very
well and very happy, and at last beginning to sing very loudly,
he forgot Mr Stevenson altogether.  All at once there was
Stevenson himself, his hair all ruffled up, his eyes full of
anger.  “Man,” he said, “you and your
infernal row have cost me more than two hundred pounds in
ideas,” and with that he was gone, but he did not address
the Count again the whole of that day.  Next morning he had
forgotten the Count’s offence and was just as friendly as
ever, but—the noise was never repeated!

Another of the Count’s stories greatly amused the
visitors:

“An English lord came all the way to Samoa
in his yacht to see Mr Stevenson, and found him in his cool
Kimino sitting with the ladies, and drinking tea on his verandah;
the whole party had their feet bare.  The English lord
thought that he must have called at the wrong time, and offered
to go away, but Mr Stevenson called out to him, and brought him
back, and made him stay to dinner.  They all went away to
dress, and the guest was left sitting alone in the
verandah.  Soon they came back, Mr Osbourne and Mr Stevenson
wearing the form of dress most usual in that hot climate a white
mess jacket, and white trousers, but their feet were still
bare.  The guest put up his eyeglass and stared for a bit,
then he looked down upon his own beautifully shod feet, and
sighed.  They all talked and laughed until the ladies came
in, the ladies in silk dresses, befrilled with lace, but still
with bare feet, and the guest took a covert look through his
eyeglass and gasped, but when he noticed that there were gold
bangles on Mrs Strong’s ankles and rings upon her toes, he
could bear no more and dropped his eyeglass on the ground of the
verandah breaking it all to bits.”

Miss Stubbs met on the other side of the island a photographer
who told her this:

“I had but recently come to Samoa,” he
said, “and was standing one day in my shop when Mr
Stevenson came in and spoke.  ‘Man,’ he said,
‘I tak ye to be a Scotsman like mysel’.’

“I would I could have claimed a kinship,” deplored
the photographer, “but, alas!  I am English to the
backbone, with never a drop of Scotch blood in my veins, and I
told him this, regretting the absence of the blood
tie.”

“‘I could have sworn your back was the back of a
Scotsman,’ was his comment, ‘but,’ and he held
out his hand, ‘you look sick, and there is a fellowship in
sickness not to be denied.’ I said I was not strong, and
had come to the Island on account of my health. 
‘Well, then,’ replied Mr Stevenson, ‘it shall
be my business to help you to get well; come to Vailima whenever
you like, and if I am out, ask for refreshment, and wait until I
come in, you will always find a welcome there.’”

At this point my informant turned away, and there was a break
in his voice as he exclaimed, “Ah, the years go on, and I
don’t miss him less, but more; next to my mother he was the
best friend I ever had: a man with a heart of gold; his house was
a second home to me.”

Stevenson’s experience shows how easy it is with a
certain type of man, to restore the old feudal conditions of
service and relationship.  Stevenson did this in essentials
in Samoa.  He tells us how he managed to get good service
out of the Samoans (who are accredited with great unwillingness
to work); and this he did by firm, but generous, kindly,
almost brotherly treatment, reviving, as it were, a kind of clan
life—giving a livery of certain colours—symbol of all
this.  A little fellow of eight, he tells, had been taken
into the household, made a pet of by Mrs Strong, his
stepdaughter, and had had a dress given to him, like that of the
men; and, when one day he had strolled down by himself as far as
the hotel, and the master of it, seeing him, called out in
Samoan, “Hi, youngster, who are you?”  The
eight-year-old replied, “Why, don’t you see for
yourself?  I am one of the Vailima men!”

The story of the Road of the Loving Heart was but
another fine attestation of it.

CHAPTER XII—HIS GENIUS AND METHODS

To have created a school of idolaters, who will out and out
swear by everything, and as though by necessity, at the same
time, a school of studious detractors, who will suspiciously
question everything, or throw out suggestions of disparagement,
is at all events, a proof of greatness, the countersign of
undoubted genius, and an assurance of lasting fame.  R. L.
Stevenson has certainly secured this.  Time will tell what
of virtue there is with either party.  For me, who knew
Stevenson, and loved him, as finding in the sweet-tempered,
brave, and in some things, most generous man, what gave at once
tone and elevation to the artist, I would fain indicate here my
impressions of him and his genius—impressions that remain
almost wholly uninfluenced by the vast mass of matter about him
that the press now turns out.  Books, not to speak of
articles, pour forth about him—about his style, his art,
his humour and his characters—aye, and even about his
religion.

Miss Simpson follows Mr Bellyse Baildon with the Edinburgh
Days, Miss Moyes Black comes on with her picture in the
Famous Scots, and Professor Raleigh succeeds her; Mr
Graham Balfour follows with his Life; Mr Kelman’s
volume about his Religion comes next, and that is reinforced by
more familiar letters and Table Talk, by Lloyd Osbourne
and Mrs Strong, his step-children; Mr J. Hammerton then comes on
handily with Stevensoniana—fruit lovingly gathered
from many and far fields, and garnered with not a little tact and
taste, and catholicity; Miss Laura Stubbs then presents us with
her touching Stevenson’s Shrine: the Record of a
Pilgrimage; and Mr Sidney Colvin is now busily at work on his
Life of Stevenson, which must do not a little to enlighten
and to settle many questions.

Curiosity and interest grow as time passes; and the places
connected with Stevenson, hitherto obscure many of them, are now
touched with light if not with romance, and are known, by name at
all events, to every reader of books.  Yes; every place he
lived in, or touched at, is worthy of full description if only on
account of its associations with him.  If there is not a
land of Stevenson, as there is a land of Scott, or of Burns, it
is due to the fact that he was far-travelled, and in his works
painted many scenes: but there are at home—Edinburgh, and
Halkerside and Allermuir, Caerketton, Swanston, and Colinton, and
Maw Moss and Rullion Green and Tummel, “the wale of
Scotland,” as he named it to me, and the Castletown of
Braemar—Braemar in his view coming a good second to Tummel,
for starting-points to any curious worshipper who would go the
round in Scotland and miss nothing.  Mr Geddie’s work
on The Home Country of Stevenson may be found very helpful
here.

1. It is impossible to separate Stevenson from his work,
because of the imperious personal element in it; and so I shall
not now strive to gain the appearance of cleverness by affecting
any distinction here.  The first thing I would say is, that
he was when I knew him—what pretty much to the end he
remained—a youth.  His outlook on life was boyishly
genial and free, despite all his sufferings from
ill-health—it was the pride of action, the joy of
endurance, the revelry of high spirits, and the sense of victory
that most fascinated him; and his theory of life was to take
pleasure and give pleasure, without calculation or stint—a
kind of boyish grace and bounty never to be overcome or disturbed
by outer accident or change.  If he was sometimes haunted
with the thought of changes through changed conditions or
circumstances, as my very old friend, Mr Charles Lowe, has told
even of the College days that he was always supposing things to
undergo some sea-change into something else, if not “into
something rich and strange,” this was but to add to his
sense of enjoyment, and the power of conferring delight, and the
luxuries of variety, as boys do when they let fancy loose. 
And this always had, with him, an individual reference or
return.  He was thus constantly, and latterly,
half-consciously, trying to interpret himself somehow through all
the things which engaged him, and which he so
transmogrified—things that especially attracted him and
took his fancy.  Thus, if it must be confessed, that even in
his highest moments, there lingers a touch—if no more than
a touch—of self-consciousness which will not allow him to
forget manner in matter, it is also true that he is cunningly
conveying traits in himself; and the sense of this is often at
the root of his sweet, gentle, naïve humour.  There is,
therefore, some truth in the criticisms which assert that even
“long John Silver,” that fine pirate, with his one
leg, was, after all, a shadow of Stevenson himself—the
genial buccaneer who did his tremendous murdering with a smile on
his face was but Stevenson thrown into new circumstances, or, as
one has said, Stevenson-cum-Henley, so thrown as was also Archer
in Weir of Hermiston, and more than this, that his most
successful women-folk—like Miss Grant and
Catriona—are studies of himself, and that in all his
heroes, and even heroines, was an unmistakable touch of R. L.
Stevenson.  Even Mr Baildon rather maladroitly admits that
in Miss Grant, the Lord Advocate’s daughter, there is a
good deal of the author himself disguised in
petticoats.  I have thought of Stevenson in many suits,
beside that which included the velvet jacket,
but—petticoats!

Youth is autocratic, and can show a grand indifferency: it
goes for what it likes, and ignores all else—it fondly
magnifies its favourites, and, after all, to a great extent, it
is but analysing, dealing with and presenting itself to us, if we
only watch well.  This is the secret of all prevailing
romance: it is the secret of all stories of adventure and
chivalry of the simpler and more primitive order; and in one
aspect it is true that R. L. Stevenson loved and clung to the
primitive and elemental, if it may not be said, as one
distinguished writer has said, that he even loved savagery in
itself.  But hardly could it be seriously held, as Mr I.
Zangwill held:

“That women did not cut any figure in his
books springs from this same interest in the elemental. 
Women are not born, but made.  They are a social product of
infinite complexity and delicacy.  For a like reason
Stevenson was no interpreter of the modern. . . . A child to the
end, always playing at ‘make-believe,’ dying young,
as those whom the gods love, and, as he would have died had he
achieved his centenary, he was the natural exponent in literature
of the child.”

But there were subtly qualifying elements beyond what Mr
Zangwill here recognises and reinforces.  That is just about
as correct and true as this other deliverance:

“His Scotch romances have been as
over-praised by the zealous Scotsmen who cry ‘genius’
at the sight of a kilt, and who lose their heads at a waft from
the heather, as his other books have been under-praised. 
The best of all, The Master of Ballantrae, ends in a bog;
and where the author aspires to exceptional subtlety of
character-drawing he befogs us or himself altogether.  We
are so long weighing the brothers Ballantrae in the balance,
watching it incline now this way, now that, scrupulously removing
a particle of our sympathy from the one brother to the other, to
restore it again in the next chapter, that we end with a
conception of them as confusing as Mr Gilbert’s conception
of Hamlet, who was idiotically sane with lucid intervals of
lunacy.”

If Stevenson was, as Mr Zangwill holds, “the child to
the end,” and the child only, then if we may not say what
Carlyle said of De Quincey: “Eccovi, that child has
been in hell,” we may say, “Eccovi, that child
has been in unchildlike haunts, and can’t forget the memory
of them.”  In a sense every romancer is a
child—such was Ludwig Tieck, such was Scott, such was James
Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd.  But each is something
more—he has been touched with the wand of a fairy, and
knows, at least, some of Elfin Land as well as of
childhood’s home.

The sense of Stevenson’s youthfulness seems to have
struck every one who had intimacy with him.  Mr Baildon
writes (p. 21 of his book):

I would now give much to possess but one of
Stevenson’s gifts—namely, that extraordinary
vividness of recollection by which he could so astonishingly
recall, not only the doings, but the very thoughts and emotions
of his youth.  For, often as we must have communed together,
with all the shameless candour of boys, hardly any remark has
stuck to me except the opinion already alluded to, which struck
me—his elder by some fifteen months—as very amusing,
that at sixteen ‘we should be men.’  He of
all mortals, who was, in a sense, always
still a boy!”

Mr Gosse tells us:

“He had retained a great deal of the
temperament of a child, and it was his philosophy to encourage
it.  In his dreary passages of bed, when his illness was
more than commonly heavy on him, he used to contrive little
amusements for himself.  He played on the flute, or he
modelled little groups and figures in clay.”

2. One of the qualifying elements unnoted by Mr Zangwill is
simply this, that R. L. Stevenson never lost the strange tint
imparted to his youth by the religious influences to which he was
subject, and which left their impress and colour on him and all
that he did.  Henley, in his striking sonnet, hit it when he
wrote:

“A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck,
Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all,
And something of the Shorter Catechist.”

Something! he was a great deal of Shorter
Catechist!  Scotch Calvinism, its metaphysic, and all the
strange whims, perversities, and questionings of “Fate,
free-will, foreknowledge absolute,” which it inevitably
awakens, was much with him—the sense of reprobation and the
gloom born of it, as well as the abounding joy in the sense of
the elect—the Covenanters and their wild resolutions, the
moss-troopers and their dare-devilries—Pentland Risings and
fights of Rullion Green; he not only never forgot them, but they
mixed themselves as in his very breath of life, and made him a
great questioner.  How would I have borne myself in this or
in that?  Supposing I had been there, how would it have
been—the same, or different from what it was with those
that were there?  His work is throughout at bottom a series
of problems that almost all trace to this root, directly or
indirectly.  “There, but for the grace of God, goes
John Bradford,” said the famous Puritan on seeing a felon
led to execution; so with Stevenson.  Hence his fondness for
tramps, for scamps (he even bestowed special attention and pains
on Villon, the poet-scamp); he was rather impatient with poor
Thoreau, because he was a purist solitary, and had too little of
vice, and, as Stevenson held, narrow in sympathy, and too
self-satisfied, and bent only on self-improvement.  He held
a brief for the honest villain, and leaned to him
brotherly.  Even the anecdotes he most prizes have a fine
look this way—a hunger for completion in achievement, even
in the violation of fine humane feeling or morality, and all the
time a sense of submission to God’s will. 
“Doctor,” said the dying gravedigger in Old
Mortality, “I hae laid three hunner an’ fower
score in that kirkyaird, an’ had it been His wull,”
indicating Heaven, “I wad hae likeit weel to hae made oot
the fower hunner.”  That took Stevenson.  Listen
to what Mr Edmond Gosse tells of his talk, when he found him in a
private hotel in Finsbury Circus, London, ready to be put on
board a steamer for America, on 21st August, 1887:

“It was church time, and there was some talk
of my witnessing his will, which I could not do because there
could be found no other reputable witness, the whole crew of the
hotel being at church.  ‘This,’ he said,
‘is the way in which our valuable city hotels—packed
no doubt with gems and jewellery—are deserted on a Sunday
morning.  Some bold piratical fellow, defying the spirit of
Sabbatarianism, might make a handsome revenue by sacking the
derelict hotels between the hours of ten and twelve.  One
hotel a week would enable such a man to retire in course of a
year.  A mask might perhaps be worn for the mere fancy of
the thing, and to terrify kitchen-maids, but no real disguise
would be needful.’”

I would rather agree with Mr Chesterton than with Mr Zangwill
here:

“Stevenson’s enormous capacity for joy
flowed directly out of his profoundly religious
temperament.  He conceived himself as an unimportant guest
at one eternal and uproarious banquet, and instead of grumbling
at the soup, he accepted it with careless gratitude. . . . His
gaiety was neither the gaiety of the pagan, nor the gaiety of the
bon vivant.  It was the greater gaiety of the
mystic.  He could enjoy trifles because there was to him no
such thing as a trifle.  He was a child who respected his
dolls because they were the images of the image of God, portraits
at only two removes.”

Here, then, we have the child crossed by the dreamer and the
mystic, bred of Calvinism and speculation on human fate and
chance, and on the mystery of temperament and inheritance, and
all that flows from these—reprobation, with its dire
shadows, assured Election with its joys, etc., etc.

3. If such a combination is in favour of the story-teller up
to a certain point, it is not favourable to the highest flights,
and it is alien to dramatic presentation pure and simple. 
This implies detachment from moods and characters, high as well
as low, that complete justice in presentation may be done to all
alike, and the one balance that obtains in life grasped and
repeated with emphasis.  But towards his leading characters
Stevenson is unconsciously biassed, because they are more or less
shadowy projections of himself, or images through which he would
reveal one or other side or aspect of his own personality. 
Attwater is a confessed failure, because it, more than any other,
testifies this: he is but a mouth-piece for one side or tendency
in Stevenson.  If the same thing is not more decisively felt
in some other cases, it is because Stevenson there showed the
better art o’ hidin’, and not because he was any more
truly detached or dramatic.  “Of Hamlet most of
all,” wrote Henley in his sonnet.  The Hamlet in
Stevenson—the self-questioning, egotistic, moralising
Hamlet—was, and to the end remained, a something alien to
bold, dramatic, creative freedom.  He is great as an artist,
as a man bent on giving to all that he did the best and most
distinguished form possible, but not great as a free creator of
dramatic power.  “Mother,” he said as a mere
child, “I’ve drawed a man.  Now, will I draw his
soul?”  He was to the end all too fond to essay a
picture of the soul, separate and peculiar.  All the Jekyll
and Hyde and even Ballantrae conceptions came out of
that—and what is more, he always mixed his own soul with
the other soul, and could not help doing so.

4. When; therefore, I find Mr Pinero, in lecturing at
Edinburgh, deciding in favour of Stevenson as possessed of rare
dramatic power, and wondering why he did not more effectively
employ it, I can’t agree with him; and this because of the
presence of a certain atmosphere in the novels, alien to free
play of the individualities presented.  Like
Hawthorne’s, like the works of our great symbolists, they
are restricted by a sense of some obtaining conception, some
weird metaphysical weird or preconception.  This is
the ground “Ian MacLaren” has for saying that
“his kinship is not with Boccaccio and Rabelais, but with
Dante and Spenser”—the ground for many remarks by
critics to the effect that they still crave from him “less
symbol and more individuality”—the ground for the
Rev. W. J. Dawson’s remark that “he has a powerful
and persistent sense of the spiritual forces which move behind
the painted shows of life; that he writes not only as a realist
but as a prophet, his meanest stage being set with eternity as a
background.”

Such expressions are fullest justification for what we have
here said: it adds, and can only add, to our admiration of
Stevenson, as a thinker, seer, or mystic, but the asserting sense
of such power can only end in lessening the height to which he
could attain as a dramatic artist; and there is much indeed
against Mr Pinero’s own view that, in the dramas, he finds
that “fine speeches” are ruinous to them as acting
plays.  In the strict sense overfine speeches are yet almost
everywhere.  David Balfour could never have writ some
speeches attributed to him—they are just R. L. Stevenson
with a very superficial difference that, when once detected,
renders them curious and quaint and interesting, but not
dramatic.

CHAPTER XIII—PREACHER AND MYSTIC FABULIST

In reality, Stevenson is always directly or indirectly
preaching a sermon—enforcing a moral—as though he
could not help it.  “He would rise from the dead to
preach a sermon.”  He wrote some first-rate fables,
and might indeed have figured to effect as a moralist-fabulist,
as truly he was from beginning to end.  There was a bit of
Bunyan in him as well as of Æsop and Rousseau and
Thoreau—the mixture that found coherency in his most
peculiarly patient and forbearing temper is what gives at once
the quaintness, the freedom, and yet the odd didactic something
that is never wanting.  I remember a fable about the Devil
that might well be brought in to illustrate this
here—careful readers who neglect nothing that Stevenson
wrote will remember it also and perhaps bear me out here.

But for the sake of the young folks who may yet have some
leeway to make up, I shall indulge myself a little by quoting it:
and, since I am on that tack, follow it by another which presents
Stevenson in his favourite guise of quizzing his own characters,
if not for his own advantage certainly for ours, if we would in
the least understand the fine moralist-casuistical qualities of
his mind and fancy:

THE DEVIL AND THE INNKEEPER

Once upon a time the devil stayed at an inn, where no one knew
him, for they were people whose education had been
neglected.  He was bent on mischief, and for a time kept
everybody by the ears.  But at last the innkeeper set a
watch upon the devil and took him in the act.

The innkeeper got a rope’s end.

“Now I am going to thrash you,” said the
inn-keeper.

“You have no right to be angry with me,” said the
devil.  “I am only the devil, and it is my nature to
do wrong.”

“Is that so?” asked the innkeeper.

“Fact, I assure you,” said the devil.

“You really cannot help doing ill?” asked the
innkeeper.

“Not in the smallest,” said the devil, “it
would be useless cruelty to thrash a thing like me.”

“It would indeed,” said the innkeeper.

And he made a noose and hanged the devil.

“There!” said the innkeeper.

The deeper Stevenson goes, the more happily is he
inspired.  We could scarcely cite anything more
Stevensonian, alike in its humour and its philosophy, than the
dialogue between Captain Smollett and Long John Silver, entitled
The Persons of the Tale.  After chapter xxxii. of
Treasure Island, these two puppets “strolled out to
have a pipe before business should begin again, and met in an
open space not far from the story.”  After a few
preliminaries:

“You’re a damned rogue, my man,”
said the Captain.

“Come, come, Cap’n, be just,” returned the
other.  “There’s no call to be angry with me in
earnest.  I’m on’y a character in a sea
story.  I don’t really exist.”

“Well, I don’t really exist either,” says
the Captain, “which seems to meet that.”

“I wouldn’t set no limits to what a virtuous
character might consider argument,” responded Silver. 
“But I’m the villain of the tale, I am; and speaking
as one seafaring man to another, what I want to know is,
what’s the odds?”

“Were you never taught your catechism?” said the
Captain.  “Don’t you know there’s such a
thing as an Author?”

“Such a thing as a Author?” returned John,
derisively.  “And who better’n me?  And the
p’int is, if the Author made you, he made Long John, and he
made Hands, and Pew, and George Merry—not that George is up
to much, for he’s little more’n a name; and he made
Flint, what there is of him; and he made this here mutiny, you
keep such a work about; and he had Tom Redruth shot;
and—well, if that’s a Author, give me Pew!”

“Don’t you believe in a future state?” said
Smollett.  “Do you think there’s nothing but the
present sorty-paper?”

“I don’t rightly know for that,” said
Silver, “and I don’t see what it’s got to do
with it, anyway.  What I know is this: if there is sich a
thing as a Author, I’m his favourite chara’ter. 
He does me fathoms better’n he does you—fathoms, he
does.  And he likes doing me.  He keeps me on deck
mostly all the time, crutch and all; and he leaves you measling
in the hold, where nobody can’t see you, nor wants to, and
you may lay to that!  If there is a Author, by thunder, but
he’s on my side, and you may lay to it!”

“I see he’s giving you a long rope,” said
the Captain. . . .

Stevenson’s stories—one and all—are too
closely the illustrations by characters of which his essays
furnish the texts.  You shall not read the one wholly apart
from the other without losing something—without losing much
of the quaint, often childish, and always insinuating personality
of the writer.  It is this if fully perceived which would
justify one writer, Mr Zangwill, if I don’t forget, in
saying, as he did say, that Stevenson would hold his place by his
essays and not by his novels.  Hence there is a unity in
all, but a unity found in a root which is ultimately inimical to
what is strictly free dramatic creation—creation, broad,
natural and unmoral in the highest sense just as nature is, as it
is to us, for example, when we speak of Shakespeare, or even
Scott, or of Cervantes or Fielding.  If Mr Henley in his
irruptive if not spiteful Pall Mall Magazine article had
made this clear from the high critical ground, then some of his
derogatory remarks would not have been quite so personal and
offensive as they are.

Stevenson’s bohemianism was always restrained and
coloured by this.  He is a casuistic moralist, if not a
Shorter Catechist, as Mr Henley put it in his clever
sonnet.  He is constantly asking himself about moral laws
and how they work themselves out in character, especially as
these suggest and involve the casuistries of human nature. 
He is often a little like Nathaniel Hawthorne, but he hardly
follows them far enough and rests on his own preconceptions and
predilections, only he does not, like him, get into or remain
long in the cobwebby corners—his love of the open air and
exercise derived from generations of active lighthouse engineers,
out at all times on sea or land, or from Scottish ministers who
were fond of composing their sermons and reflecting on the
backwardness of human nature as they walked in their gardens or
along the hillsides even among mists and storms, did something to
save him here, reinforcing natural cheerfulness and the warm
desire to give pleasure.  His excessive elaboration of
style, which grew upon him more and more, giving throughout often
a sense of extreme artificiality and of the self-consciousness
usually bred of it, is but another incidental proof of
this.  And let no reader think that I wish here to decry R.
L. Stevenson.  I only desire faithfully to try to understand
him, and to indicate the class or group to which his genius and
temperament really belong.  He is from first to last the
idealistic dreamy or mystical romancer, and not the true idealist
or dealer direct with life or character for its own sake. 
The very beauty and sweetness of his spirit in one way militated
against his dramatic success—he really did not believe in
villains, and always made them better than they should have been,
and that, too, on the very side where wickedness—their
natural wickedness—is most available—on the
stage.  The dreamer of dreams and the Shorter Catechist,
strangely united together, were here directly at odds with the
creative power, and crossed and misdirected it, and the casuist
came in and manoeuvred the limelight—all too like the old
devil of the mediaeval drama, who was made only to be laughed at
and taken lightly, a buffoon and a laughing-stock indeed. 
And while he could unveil villainy, as is the case pre-eminently
in Huish in the Ebb-Tide, he shrank from inflicting the
punishments for which untutored human nature looks, and thus he
lost one great aid to crude dramatic effect.  As to his
poems, they are intimately personal in his happiest moments: he
deals with separate moods and sentiments, and scarcely ever
touches those of a type alien to his own.  The defect of his
child poems is distinctly that he is everywhere strictly
recalling and reproducing his own quaint and wholly exceptional
childhood; and children, ordinary, normal, healthy children, will
not take to these poems (though grown-ups largely do so), as they
would to, say, the Lilliput Levée of my old friend,
W. B. Rands.  Rands showed a great deal of true dramatic
play there within his own very narrow limits, as, at all events,
adults must conceive them.

Even in his greatest works, in The Master of Ballantrae
and Weir of Hermiston, the special power in Stevenson
really lies in subduing his characters at the most critical point
for action, to make them prove or sustain his thesis; and in this
way the rare effect that he might have secured
dramatically is largely lost and make-believe substituted,
as in the Treasure Search in the end of The Master of
Ballantrae.  The powerful dramatic effect he might have
had in his dénouement is thus completely
sacrificed.  The essence of the drama for the stage is that
the work is for this and this alone—dialogue and everything
being only worked rightly when it bears on, aids, and finally
secures this in happy completeness.

In a word, you always, in view of true dramatic effect, see
Stevenson himself too clearly behind his characters.  The
“fine speeches” Mr Pinero referred to trace to the
intrusion behind the glass of a part-quicksilvered portion, which
cunningly shows, when the glass is moved about, Stevenson himself
behind the character, as we have said already.  For long he
shied dealing with women, as though by a true instinct. 
Unfortunately for him his image was as clear behind
Catriona, with the discerning, as anywhere else; and this,
alas! too far undid her as an independent, individual character,
though traits like those in her author were attractive.  The
constant effort to relieve the sense of this affords him the most
admirable openings for the display of his exquisite style, of
which he seldom or never fails to make the very most in this
regard; but the necessity laid upon him to aim at securing a
sense of relief by this is precisely the same as led him to write
the overfine speeches in the plays, as Mr Pinero found and
pointed out at Edinburgh: both defeat the true end, but in the
written book mere art of style and a naïvete and a certain
sweetness of temper conceal the lack of nature and creative
spontaneity; while on the stage the descriptions, saving
reflections and fine asides, are ruthlessly cut away under sheer
stage necessities, or, if left, but hinder the action; and art of
this kind does not there suffice to conceal the lack of
nature.

More clearly to bring out my meaning here and draw aid from
comparative illustration, let me take my old friend of many
years, Charles Gibbon.  Gibbon was poor, very poor, in
intellectual subtlety compared with Stevenson; he had none of his
sweet, quaint, original fancy; he was no casuist; he was utterly
void of power in the subdued humorous twinkle or genial by-play
in which Stevenson excelled.  But he has more of dramatic
power, pure and simple, than Stevenson had—his
novels—the best of them—would far more easily yield
themselves to the ordinary purposes of the ordinary
playwright.  Along with conscientiousness, perception,
penetration, with the dramatist must go a certain indescribable
common-sense commonplaceness—if I may name it
so—protection against vagary and that over-refined egotism
and self-confession which is inimical to the drama and in which
the Stevensonian type all too largely abounds for successful
dramatic production.  Mr Henley perhaps put it too strongly
when he said that what was supremely of interest to R. L.
Stevenson was Stevenson himself; but he indicates the tendency,
and that tendency is inimical to strong, broad, effective and
varied dramatic presentation.  Water cannot rise above its
own level; nor can minds of this type go freely out of themselves
in a grandly healthy, unconscious, and unaffected way, and this
is the secret of the dramatic spirit, if it be not, as Shelley
said, the secret of morals, which Stevenson, when he passed away,
was but on the way to attain.  As we shall see, he had risen
so far above it, subdued it, triumphed over it, that we really
cannot guess what he might have attained had but more years been
given him.  For the last attainment of the loftiest and
truest genius is precisely this—to gain such insight of the
real that all else becomes subsidiary.  True simplicity and
the abiding relief and enduring power of true art with all
classes lies here and not elsewhere.  Cleverness,
refinement, fancy, and invention, even sublety of intellect, are
practically nowhere in this sphere without this.

CHAPTER XIV—STEVENSON AS DRAMATIST

In opposition to Mr Pinero, therefore, I assert that
Stevenson’s defect in spontaneous dramatic presentation is
seen clearly in his novels as well as in his plays proper.

In writing to my good friend, Mr Thomas M’Kie, Advocate,
Edinburgh, telling him of my work on R. L. Stevenson and the
results, I thus gathered up in little the broad reflections on
this point, and I may perhaps be excused quoting the following
passages, as they reinforce by a new reference or illustration or
two what has just been said:

“Considering his great keenness and force on
some sides, I find R. L. Stevenson markedly deficient in grip on
other sides—common sides, after all, of human nature. 
This was so far largely due to a dreamy, mystical, so far
perverted and, so to say, often even inverted casuistical,
fatalistic morality, which would not allow him scope in what
Carlyle would have called a healthy hatred of fools and
scoundrels; with both of which classes—vagabonds in
strictness—he had rather too much of a sneaking
sympathy.  Mr Pinero was wrong—totally and
incomprehensibly wrong—when he told the good folks of
Edinburgh at the Philosophical Institution, and afterwards at the
London Birkbeck Institution, that it was lack of concentration
and care that made R. L. Stevenson a failure as a
dramatist.  No: it was here and not elsewhere that the
failure lay.  R. L. Stevenson was himself an unconscious
paradox—and sometimes he realised it—his great
weakness from this point of view being that he wished to show
strong and original by making the villain the hero of the piece
as well.  Now, that, if it may, by clever
manipulation and dexterity, be made to do in a novel, most
certainly it will not do on the stage—more especially if it
is done consciously and, as it were, of malice prepense;
because, for one thing, there is in the theatre a very varied yet
united audience which has to give a simultaneous and immediate
verdict—an audience not inclined to some kinds of
overwrought subtleties and casuistries, however clever the
technique.  If The Master of Ballantrae (which has
some highly dramatic scenes and situations, if it is not in
itself substantially a drama) were to be put on the stage, the
playwright, if wisely determined for success, would really
have—not in details, but in essential conception—to
kick R. L. Stevenson in his most personal aim out of it, and take
and present a more definite moral view of the two villain-heroes
(brothers, too); improve and elevate the one a bit if he lowered
the other, and not wobble in sympathy and try to make the
audience wobble in sympathy also, as R. L. Stevenson certainly
does.  As for Beau Austin, it most emphatically, in
view of this, should be re-writ—re-writ especially towards
the ending—and the scandalous Beau tarred and feathered,
metaphorically speaking, instead of walking off at the end in a
sneaking, mincing sort of way, with no more than a little
momentary twinge of discomfort at the wreck and ruin he has
wrought, for having acted as a selfish, snivelling poltroon and
coward, though in fine clothes and with fine ways and fine
manners, which only, from our point of view, make matters
worse.  It is, with variations I admit, much the same all
through: R. L. Stevenson felt it and confessed it about the
Ebb-Tide, and Huish, the cockney hero and villain; but the
sense of healthy disgust, even at the vile Huish, is not
emphasised in the book as it would have demanded to be for the
stage—the audience would not have stood it, and the more
mixed and varied, the less would it have stood it—not at
all; and his relief of style and fine or finished speeches would
not there in the least have told.  This is demanded
of the drama—that at once it satisfies a certain crude
something subsisting under all outward glosses and veneers that
might be in some a lively sense of right and wrong—the
uprisal of a conscience, in fact, or in others a vague instinct
of proper reward or punishment, which will even cover and
sanction certain kinds of revenge or retaliation.  The one
feeling will emerge most among the cultured, and the other among
the ruder and more ignorant; but both meet immediately on
beholding action and the limits of action on the demand for some
clear leading to what may be called Providential
equity—each man undoubtedly rewarded or punished, roughly,
according to his deserts, if not outwardly then certainly in the
inner torments that so often lead to confessions.  There it
is—a radical fact of human nature—as radical as any
reading of trait or determination of character
presented—seen in the Greek drama as well as in Shakespeare
and the great Elizabethan dramatists, and in the
drama-transpontine and others of to-day.  R. L. Stevenson
was all too casuistical (though not in the exclusively bad sense)
for this; and so he was not dramatic, though Weir of
Hermiston promised something like an advance to it, and St
Ives did, in my idea, yet more.”

The one essential of a dramatic piece is that, by the
interaction of character and incident (one or other may be
preponderating, according to the type and intention of the
writer) all naturally leads up to a crisis in which the moral
motives, appealed to or awakened by the presentation of the play,
are justified.  Where this is wanting the true leading and
the definite justification are wanting.  Goethe failed in
this in his Faust, resourceful and far-seeing though he
was—he failed because a certain sympathy is awakened for
Mephistopheles in being, so to say, chivied out of his bargain,
when he had complied with the terms of the contract by Faust; and
Gounod in his opera does exactly for “immediate dramatic
effect,” what we hold it would be necessary to do for R. L.
Stevenson.  Goethe, with his casuistries which led him to
allegory and all manner of overdone symbolisms and perversions in
the Second Part, is set aside and a true crisis and close is
found by Gounod through simply sending Marguerite above and Faust
below, as, indeed, Faust had agreed by solemn compact with
Mephistopheles that it should be.  And to come to another
illustration from our own times, Mr Bernard Shaw’s very
clever and all too ingenious and over-subtle Man and
Superman would, in my idea, and for much the same reason, be
an utterly ineffective and weak piece on the stage, however
carefully handled and however clever the setting—the reason
lying in the egotistic upsetting of the “personal
equation” and the theory of life that lies behind
all—tinting it with strange and even outré
colours.  Much the same has to be said of most of what are
problem-plays—several of Ibsen’s among the rest.

Those who remember the Fairy opera of Hansel and Gretel
on the stage in London, will not have forgotten in the witching
memory of all the charms of scenery and setting, how the scene
where the witch of the wood, who was planning out the baking of
the little hero and heroine in her oven, having
“fatted” them up well, to make sweet her eating of
them, was by the coolness and cleverness of the heroine locked in
her own oven and baked there, literally brought down the
house.  She received exactly what she had planned to give
those children, whom their own cruel parents had unwittingly, by
losing the children in the wood, put into her hands. 
Quaint, naïve, half-grotesque it was in conception, yet the
truth of all drama was there actively exhibited, and all
casuistic pleading of excuses of some sort, even of justification
for the witch (that it was her nature; heredity in her aworking,
etc., etc.) would have not only been out of place, but hotly
resented by that audience.  Now, Stevenson, if he could have
made up his mind to have the witch locked in her own oven, would
most assuredly have tried some device to get her out by some
fairy witch-device or magic slide at the far end of it, and have
proceeded to paint for us the changed character that she was
after she had been so outwitted by a child, and her witchdom
proved after all of little effect.  He would have put
probably some of the most effective moralities into her mouth if
indeed he would not after all have made the witch a triumph on
his early principle of bad-heartedness being strength.  If
this is the sort of falsification which the play demands, and is
of all tastes the most ungrateful, then, it is clear, that for
full effect of the drama it is essential to it; but what is
primary in it is the direct answering to certain immediate and
instinctive demands in common human nature, the doing of which is
far more effective than no end of deep philosophy to show how
much better human nature would be if it were not just quite thus
constituted.  “Concentration,” says Mr Pinero,
“is first, second, and last in it,” and he goes on
thus, as reported in the Scotsman, to show
Stevenson’s defect and mistake and, as is not, of course,
unnatural, to magnify the greatness and grandeur of the style of
work in which he has himself been so successful.

“If Stevenson had ever mastered that
art—and I do not question that if he had properly conceived
it he had it in him to master it—he might have found the
stage a gold mine, but he would have found, too, that it is a
gold mine which cannot be worked in a smiling, sportive,
half-contemptuous spirit, but only in the sweat of the brain, and
with every mental nerve and sinew strained to its
uttermost.  He would have known that no ingots are to be got
out of this mine, save after sleepless nights, days of gloom and
discouragement, and other days, again, of feverish toil, the
result of which proves in the end to be misapplied and has to be
thrown to the winds. . . . When you take up a play-book (if ever
you do take one up) it strikes you as being a very trifling
thing—a mere insubstantial pamphlet beside the imposing
bulk of the latest six-shilling novel.  Little do you guess
that every page of the play has cost more care, severer mental
tension, if not more actual manual labour, than any chapter of a
novel, though it be fifty pages long.  It is the height of
the author’s art, according to the old maxim, that the
ordinary spectator should never be clearly conscious of the skill
and travail that have gone to the making of the finished
product.  But the artist who would achieve a like feat must
realise its difficulties, or what are his chances of
success?”

But what I should, in little, be inclined to say, in answer to
the “concentration” idea is that, unless you have
first some firm hold on the broad bed-rock facts of human nature
specially appealed to or called forth by the drama, you may
concentrate as much as you please, but you will not write a
successful acting drama, not to speak of a great one.  Mr
Pinero’s magnifications of the immense effort demanded from
him must in the end come to mean that he himself does not
instinctively and with natural ease and spontaneity secure this,
but secures it only after great conscious effort; and hence,
perhaps, it is that he as well as so many other modern
playwrights fall so far behind alike in the amount turned out,
and also in its quality as compared with the products of many
playwrights in the past.

The problem drama, in every phase and turn of it, endeavours
to dispense with these fundamental demands implied in the common
and instinctive sense or consciousness of the mass of men and
women, and to substitute for that interest something which will
artificially supersede it, or, at any rate, take its place. 
The interest is transferred from the crises necessarily worked up
to in the one case, with all of situation and dialogue directed
to it, and without which it would not be strictly explicable, to
something abnormal, odd, artificial or inverted, or exceptional
in the characters themselves.  Having thus, instead of
natural process and sequence, if we may put it so, the problem
dramatist has a double task—he must gain what unity he can,
and reach such crises as he may by artificial aids and inventions
which the more he uses the more makes natural simplicity
unattainable; and next he must reduce and hide as far as he can
the abnormality he has, after all, in the long run, created and
presented.  He cannot maintain it to the full, else his work
would become a mere medical or psychological treatise under the
poorest of disguises; and the very necessity for the action and
reaction of characters upon each other is a further element
against him.  In a word no one character can stand alone,
and cannot escape influencing others, and also the action. 
Thus it is that he cannot isolate as a doctor does his patient
for scientific examination.  The healthy and normal must
come in to modify on all sides what is presented of unhealthy and
abnormal, and by its very presence expose the other, while at the
same time it, by its very presence, ministers improvement,
exactly as the sunlight disperses mist and all unhealthy vapours,
germs, and microbes.

The problem dramatist, in place of broad effect and truth to
nature, must find it in stress of invention and resource of that
kind.  Thus care and concentration must be all in all with
him—he must never let himself go, or get so interested and
taken with his characters that they, in a sense, control
or direct him.  He is all too conscious a
“maker” and must pay for his originality by what in
the end is really painful and overweighted work.  This, I
take it, is the reason why so many of the modern dramatists find
their work so hard, and are, comparatively, so slow in the
production of it, while they would fain, by many devices, secure
the general impression or appeal made to all classes alike by the
natural or what we may call spontaneous drama, they are yet, by
the necessity of subject matter and methods of dealing with it,
limited to the real interest of a special class—to whom is
finally given up what was meant for mankind—and the
troublesome and trying task laid on them, to try as best they may
to reconcile two really conflicting tendencies which cannot even
by art be reconciled but really point different ways and tend to
different ends.  As the impressionist and the
pre-Raphaelite, in the sister-art of painting cannot be combined
and reconciled in one painter—so it is here; by conception
and methods they go different ways, and if they seek the
same end, it is by opposing processes—the original
conception alike of nature and of art dictating the process.

As for Stevenson, it was no lack of care or concentration in
anything that he touched; these two were never lacking, but
because his subtlety, mystical bias and dreaminess, and
theorising on human nature made this to him impossible.  He
might have concentrated as much as he pleased, concentrated as
much as even Mr Pinero desires, but he would not have made a
successful drama, because he was Robert Louis Stevenson, and not
Mr Pinero, and too long, as he himself confessed, had a tendency
to think bad-heartedness was strength; while the only true and
enduring joy attainable in this world—whether by deduction
from life itself, or from impressions of art or of the
drama, is simply the steady, unassailable, and triumphant
consciousness that it is not so, but the reverse, that goodness
and self-sacrifice and self-surrender are the only strength in
the universe.  Just as Byron had it with
patriotism:—

“Freedom’s battle once begun,
Bequeathed from bleeding sire to son,
Tho’ baffled oft is ever won.”

To go consciously either in fiction or in the drama for
bad-heartedness as strength, is to court failure—the broad,
healthy, human heart, thank Heaven, is so made as to resent the
doctrine; and if a fiction or a play based on this idea for the
moment succeeds, it can only be because of strength in other
elements, or because of partial blindness and partially paralysed
moral sense in the case of those who accept it and joy in
it.  If Mr Pinero directly disputes this, then he and I have
no common standing-ground, and I need not follow the matter any
further.  Of course, the dramatist may, under mistaken
sympathy and in the midst of complex and bewildering
concatenations, give wrong readings to his audience, but he must
not be always doing even that, or doing it on principle or
system, else his work, however careful and concentrated, will
before long share the fate of the Stevenson-Henley dramas
confessedly wrought when the authors all too definitely held
bad-heartedness was strength.

CHAPTER XV—THEORY OF GOOD AND EVIL

We have not hitherto concerned ourselves, in any express
sense, with the ethical elements involved in the tendency now
dwelt on, though they are, of necessity, of a very vital
character.  We have shown only as yet the effect of this
mood of mind on dramatic intention and effort.  The position
is simply that there is, broadly speaking, the endeavour to
eliminate an element which is essential to successful dramatic
presentation.  That element is the eternal distinction,
speaking broadly, between good and evil—between right and
wrong—between the secret consciousness of having done
right, and the consciousness of mere strength and force in
certain other ways.

Nothing else will make up for vagueness and cloudiness
here—no technical skill, no apt dialogue nor concentration,
any more than “fine speeches,” as Mr Pinero calls
them.  Now the dramatic demand and the ethical demand here
meet and take each other’s hands, and will not be
separated.  This is why Mr Stevenson and Mr
Henley—young men of great talent, failed—utterly
failed—they thought they could make a hero out of a shady
and dare-devil yet really cowardly villain generally—and
failed.

The spirit of this is of the clever youth type—all too
ready to forego the moral for the sake of the fun any day of the
week, and the unthinking selfishness and self-enjoyment of
youth—whose tender mercies are often cruel, are
transcendent in it.  As Stevenson himself said, they were
young men then and fancied bad-heartedness was strength. 
Perhaps it was a sense of this that made R. L. Stevenson speak as
he did of the Ebb-Tide with Huish the cockney in it, after
he was powerless to recall it; which made him say, as we have
seen, that the closing chapters of The Master of
Ballantrae “shame, and perhaps degrade,
the beginning.”  He himself came to see then
the great error; but, alas! it was too late to remedy it—he
could but go forward to essay new tales, not backward to put
right errors in what was done.

Did Mr William Archer have anything of this in his mind and
the far-reaching effects on this side, when he wrote the
following:

“Let me add that the omission with which, in
1885, I mildly reproached him—the omission to tell what he
knew to be an essential part of the truth about life—was
abundantly made good in his later writings.  It is true that
even in his final philosophy he still seems to me to underrate,
or rather to shirk, the significance of that most compendious
parable which he thus relates in a letter to Mr Henry
James:—‘Do you know the story of the man who found a
button in his hash, and called the waiter?  “What do
you call that?” says he.  “Well,” said the
waiter, “what d’you expect?  Expect to find a
gold watch and chain?”  Heavenly apologue, is it
not?’  Heavenly, by all means; but I think Stevenson
relished the humour of it so much that he ‘smiling passed
the moral by.’  In his enjoyment of the waiter’s
effrontery, he forgot to sympathise with the man (even though it
was himself) who had broken his teeth upon the harmful,
unnecessary button.  He forgot that all the apologetics in
the world are based upon just this audacious
paralogism.”

Many writers have done the same—and not a few critics
have hinted at this: I do not think any writer has got at the
radical truth of it more directly, decisively, and clearly than
“J. F. M.,” in a monthly magazine, about the time of
Stevenson’s death; and the whole is so good and clear that
I must quote it—the writer was not thinking of the drama
specially; only of prose fiction, and this but makes the passage
the more effective and apt to my point.

“In the outburst of regret which followed
the death of Robert Louis Stevenson, one leading journal dwelt on
his too early removal in middle life ‘with only half his
message delivered.’  Such a phrase may have been used
in the mere cant of modern journalism.  Still it set one
questioning what was Stevenson’s message, or at least that
part of it which we had time given us to hear.

“Wonderful as was the popularity of the dead author, we
are inclined to doubt whether the right appreciation of him was
half as wide.  To a certain section of the public he seemed
a successful writer of boys’ books, which yet held captive
older people.  Now, undoubtedly there was an element (not
the highest) in his work which fascinated boys.  It
gratified their yearning for adventure.  To too large a
number of his readers, we suspect, this remains Stevenson’s
chief charm; though even of those there were many able to
recognise and be thankful for the literary power and grace which
could serve up their sanguinary diet so daintily.

“Most of Stevenson’s titles, too, like Treasure
Island, Kidnapped, and The Master of
Ballantrae, tended to foster delusion in this
direction.  The books were largely bought for gifts by
maiden aunts, and bestowed as school prizes, when it might not
have been so had their titles given more indication of their real
scope and tendency.

“All this, it seems to us, has somewhat obscured
Stevenson’s true power, which is surely that of an
arch-delineator of ‘human nature’ and of the devious
ways of men.  As we read him we feel that we have our finger
on the pulse of the cruel politics of the world.  He has the
Shakespearean gift which makes us recognise that his pirates and
his statesmen, with their violence and their murders and their
perversions of justice, are swayed by the same interests and are
pulling the same strings and playing on the same passions which
are at work in quieter methods around ourselves.  The vast
crimes and the reckless bloodshed are nothing more nor less than
stage effects used to accentuate for the common eye what the seer
can detect without them.

“And reading him from this standpoint, Stevenson’s
‘message’ (so far as it was delivered) appears to be
that of utter gloom—the creed that good is always overcome
by evil.  We do not mean in the sense that good always
suffers through evil and is frequently crucified by evil. 
That is only the sowing of the martyr’s blood, which is, we
know, the seed of the Church.  We should not have marvelled
in the least that a genius like Stevenson should rebel against
mere external ‘happy endings,’ which, being in flat
contradiction to the ordinary ways of Providence, are little
short of thoughtless blasphemy against Providence.  But the
terrible thing about the Stevenson philosophy of life is that it
seems to make evil overcome good in the sense of absorbing it, or
perverting it, or at best lowering it.  When good and evil
come in conflict in one person, Dr Jekyll vanishes into Mr
Hyde.  The awful Master of Ballantrae drags down his
brother, though he seems to fight for his soul at every
step.  The sequel to Kidnapped shows David Balfour
ready at last to be hail-fellow-well-met with the supple
Prestongrange and the other intriguers, even though they had
forcibly made him a partner to their shedding of innocent
blood.

“Is it possible that this was what Stevenson’s
experience of real life had brought him?  Fortunate himself
in so many respects, he was yet one of those who turn aside from
the smooth and sunny paths of life, to enter into brotherly
sympathy and fellowship with the disinherited.  Is this,
then, what he found on those darker levels?  Did he discover
that triumphant hypocrisy treads down souls as well as lives?

“We cannot doubt that it often does so; and it is well
that we should see this sometimes, to make us strong to contend
with evil before it works out this, its worst mischief, and to
rouse us from the easy optimist laziness which sits idle while
others are being wronged, and bids them believe ‘that all
will come right in the end,’ when it is our direct duty to
do our utmost to make it ‘come right’ to-day.

“But to show us nothing but the gloomy side, nothing but
the weakness of good, nothing but the strength of evil, does not
inspire us to contend for the right, does not inform us of the
powers and weapons with which we might so contend.  To gaze
at unqualified and inevitable moral defeat will but leave us to
the still worse laziness of pessimism, uttering its discouraging
and blasphemous cry, ‘It does not matter; nothing will ever
come right!’

“Shakespeare has shown us—and never so nobly as in
his last great creation of The Tempest—that a man
has one stronghold which none but himself can deliver over to the
enemy—that citadel of his own conduct and character, from
which he can smile supreme upon the foe, who may have conquered
all down the line, but must finally make pause there.

“We must remember that The Tempest was
Shakespeare’s last work.  The genuine consciousness of
the possible triumph of the moral nature against every assault is
probably reserved for the later years of life, when, somewhat
withdrawn from the passions of its struggle, we become those
lookers-on who see most of the game.  Strange fate is it
that so much of our genius vanishes into the great silence before
those later years are reached!”

Stevenson was too late in awakening fully to the tragic error
to which short-sighted youth is apt to wander that
“bad-heartedness is strength.”  And so, from
this point of view, to our sorrow, he too much verified
Goethe’s saw that “simplicity (not artifice) and
repose are the acme of art, and therefore no youth can be a
master.”  In fact, he might very well from another
side, have taken one of Goethe’s fine sayings as a motto
for himself:

“Greatest saints were ever most
kindly-hearted to sinners;
Here I’m a saint with the best; sinners I never could
hate.” [7]

Stevenson’s own verdict on Deacon Brodie given to
a New York Herald reporter on the author’s arrival
in New York in September 1887, on the Ludgate Hill, is
thus very near the precise truth: “The piece has been all
overhauled, and though I have no idea whether it will please an
audience, I don’t think either Mr Henley or I are ashamed
of it.  But we were both young men when we did that,
and I think we had an idea that bad-heartedness was
strength.”

If Mr Henley in any way confirmed R. L. Stevenson in this
perversion, as I much fear he did, no true admirer of Stevenson
has much to thank him for, whatever claims he may have fancied he
had to Stevenson’s eternal gratitude.  He did
Stevenson about the very worst turn he could have done, and aided
and abetted in robbing us and the world of yet greater works than
we have had from his hands.  He was but condemning himself
when he wrote some of the detractory things he did in the Pall
Mall Magazine about the Edinburgh Edition, etc. 
Men are mirrors in which they see each other: Henley, after all,
painted himself much more effectively in that now notorious
Pall Mall Magazine article than he did R. L.
Stevenson.  Such is the penalty men too often pay for
wreaking paltry revenges—writing under morbid memories and
narrow and petty grievances—they not only fail in truth and
impartiality, but inscribe a kind of grotesque parody of
themselves in their effort to make their subject ridiculous, as
he did, for example, about the name Lewis=Louis, and various
other things.

R. L. Stevenson’s fate was to be a casuistic and mystic
moralist at bottom, and could not help it; while, owing to some
kink or twist, due, perhaps, mainly to his earlier sufferings,
and the teachings he then received, he could not help giving it
always a turn to what he himself called
“tail-foremost” or inverted morality; and it was not
till near the close that he fully awakened to the fact that here
he was false to the truest canons at once of morality and life
and art, and that if he pursued this course his doom was, and
would be, to make his endings “disgrace, or perhaps,
degrade his beginnings,” and that no true and effective
dramatic unity and effect and climax was to be gained.  Pity
that he did so much on this perverted view of life and world and
art: and well it is that he came to perceive it, even though
almost too late:—certainly too late for that full
presentment of that awful yet gladdening presence of a
God’s power and equity in this seeming tangled web of a
world, the idea which inspired Robert Browning as well as
Wordsworth, when he wrote, and gathered it up into a few lines in
Pippa Passes:

“The year’s at the spring,
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hillsides dew-pearled;

The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn:
God’s in His heaven,
All’s right with the world.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

“All service ranks the same with God,
If now, as formerly he trod
Paradise, His presence fills
Our earth, each only as God wills
Can work—God’s puppets best and worst,
Are we; there is no last or first.”

It shows what he might have accomplished, had longer life been
but allowed him.

CHAPTER XVI—STEVENSON’S GLOOM

The problem of Stevenson’s gloom cannot be solved by any
commonplace cut-and-dried process.  It will remain a problem
only unless (1) his original dreamy tendency crossed, if not
warped, by the fatalistic Calvinism which was drummed into him by
father, mother, and nurse in his tender years, is taken fully
into account; then (2) the peculiar action on such a nature of
the unsatisfying and, on the whole, distracting effect of the
bohemian and hail-fellow-well-met sort of ideal to which he
yielded, and which has to be charged with much; and (3) the
conflict in him of a keenly social animus with a very strong
egotistical effusiveness, fed by fancy, and nourished by the
enforced solitariness inevitable in the case of one who, from
early years up, suffered from painful, and even crushing,
disease.

His text and his sermon—which may be shortly summed in
the following sentence—be kind, for in kindness to others
lies the only true pleasure to be gained in life; be cheerful,
even to the point of egotistic self-satisfaction, for through
cheerfulness only is the flow of this incessant kindliness of
thought and service possible.  He was not in harmony with
the actual effect of much of his creative work, though he
illustrated this in his life, as few men have done.  He
regarded it as the highest duty of life to give pleasure to
others; his art in his own idea thus became in an unostentatious
way consecrated, and while he would not have claimed to be a
seer, any more than he would have claimed to be a saint, as he
would have held in contempt a mere sybarite, most certainly a
vein of unblamable hedonism pervaded his whole philosophy of
life.  Suffering constantly, he still was always
kindly.  He encouraged, as Mr Gosse has said, this
philosophy by every resource open to him.  In practical
life, all who knew him declared that he was brightness,
naïve fancy, and sunshine personified, and yet he could not
help always, somehow, infusing into his fiction a pronounced, and
sometimes almost fatal, element of gloom.  Even in his own
case they were not pleasure-giving and failed thus in
essence.  Some wise critic has said that no man can ever
write well creatively of that in which in his early youth he had
no knowledge.  Always behind Stevenson’s latest
exercises lies the shadow of this as an unshifting background,
which by art may be relieved, but never refined away
wholly.  He cannot escape from it if he would.  Here,
too, as George MacDonald has neatly and nicely said: We are the
victims of our own past, and often a hand is put forth upon us
from behind and draws us into life backward.  Here was
Stevenson, with his half-hedonistic theories of life, the duty of
giving pleasure, of making eyes brighter, and casting sunshine
around one wherever one went, yet the creator of gloom for us,
when all the world was before him where to choose.  This
fateful shadow pursued him to the end, often giving us, as it
were, the very justificative ground for his own father’s
despondency and gloom, which the son rather too decisively
reproved, while he might have sympathised with it in a stranger,
and in that most characteristic letter to his mother, which we
have quoted, said that it made his father often seem, to him, to
be ungrateful—“Has the man no
gratitude?”  Two selves thus persistently and
constantly struggled in Stevenson.  He was from this point
of view, indeed, his own Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the buoyant,
self-enjoying, because pleasure-conferring, man, and at the same
time the helpless yet fascinating “dark interpreter”
of the gloomy and gloom-inspiring side of life, viewed from the
point of view of dominating character and inherited
influence.  When he reached out his hand with desire of
pleasure-conferring, lo and behold, as he wrote, a hand from his
forefathers was stretched out, and he was pulled backward; so
that, as he has confessed, his endings were apt to shame, perhaps
to degrade, the beginnings.  Here is something pointing to
the hidden and secret springs that feed the deeper will and bend
it to their service.  Individuality itself is but a mirror,
which by its inequalities transforms things to odd shapes. 
Hawthorne confessed to something of this sort.  He, like
Stevenson, suffered much in youth, if not from disease then
through accident, which kept him long from youthful
company.  At a time when he should have been running free
with other boys, he had to be lonely, reading what books he could
lay his hands on, mostly mournful and puritanic, by the borders
of lone Sebago Lake.  He that hath once in youth been
touched by this Marah-rod of bitterness will not easily escape
from it, when he essays in later years to paint life and the
world as he sees them; nay, the hand, when he deems himself
freest, will be laid upon him from behind, if not to pull him, as
MacDonald has said, into life backward, then to make him a
mournful witness of having once been touched by the Marah-rod,
whose bitterness again declares itself and wells out its
bitterness when set even in the rising and the stirring of the
waters.

Such is our view of the “gloom” of
Stevenson—a gloom which well might have justified something
of his father’s despondency.  He struggles in vain to
escape from it—it narrows, it fatefully hampers and limits
the free field of his art, lays upon it a strange atmosphere,
fascinating, but not favourable to true dramatic breadth and
force, and spontaneous natural simplicity, invariably lending a
certain touch of weakness, inconsistency, and inconclusiveness to
his endings; so that he himself could too often speak of them
afterwards as apt to “shame, perhaps to degrade, the
beginnings.”  This is what true dramatic art should
never do.  In the ending all that may raise legitimate
question in the process—all that is confusing, perplexing
in the separate parts—is met, solved, reconciled, at least
in a way satisfactory to the general, or ordinary mind; and thus
such unity is by it so gained and sealed, that in no case can the
true artist, whatever faults may lie in portions of the
process-work, say of his endings that “they shame, perhaps
degrade, the beginning.”  Wherever this is the case
there will be “gloom,” and there will also be a sad,
tormenting sense of something wanting.  “The evening
brings a ‘hame’;” so should it be
here—should it especially be in a dramatic work.  If
not, “We start; for soul is wanting there;” or, if
not soul, then the last halo of the soul’s serene
triumph.  From this side, too, there is another cause for
the undramatic character, in the stricter sense of
Stevenson’s work generally: it is, after all, distressful,
unsatisfying, egotistic, for fancy is led at the beck of some
pre-established disharmony which throws back an abiding and
irremovable gloom on all that went before; and the free
spontaneous grace of natural creation which ensures natural
simplicity is, as said already, not quite attained.

It was well pointed out in Hammerton, by an unanonymous
author there quoted (pp. 22, 23), that while in the story, Hyde,
the worse one, wins, in Stevenson himself—in his real
life—Jekyll won, and not Mr Hyde.  This writer, too,
might have added that the Master of Ballantrae also wins as well
as Beau Austin and Deacon Brodie.  R. L. Stevenson’s
dramatic art and a good deal of his fiction, then, was untrue to
his life, and on one side was a lie—it was not in
consonance with his own practice or his belief as expressed in
life.

In some other matters the test laid down here is not difficult
of application.  Stevenson, at the time he wrote The
Foreigner at Home, had seen a good deal; he had been abroad;
he had already had experiences; he had had differences with his
father about Calvinism and some other things; and yet just see
how he applies the standard of his earlier knowledge and
observation to England—and by doing so, cannot help
exaggerating the outstanding differences, always with an almost
provincial accent of unwavering conviction due to his early
associations and knowledge.  He cannot help paying an
excessive tribute to the Calvinism he had formally rejected, in
so far as, according to him, it goes to form character—even
national character, at all events, in its production of types;
and he never in any really effective way glances at what Mr
Matthew Arnold called “Scottish manners, Scottish
drink” as elements in any way radically qualifying. 
It is not, of course, that I, as a Scotsman, well acquainted with
rural life in some parts of England, as with rural life in many
parts of Scotland in my youth, do not heartily agree with
him—the point is that, when he comes to this sort of
comparison and contrast, he writes exactly as his father would or
might have done, with a full consciousness, after all, of the
tribute he was paying to the practical outcome on character of
the Calvinism in which he so thoroughly believed.  It is, in
its way, a very peculiar thing—and had I space, and did I
believe it would prove interesting to readers in general, I might
write an essay on it, with instances—in which case the
Address to the Scottish Clergy would come in for more notice,
citation and application than it has yet received.  But
meanwhile just take this little snippet—very characteristic
and very suggestive in its own way—and tell me whether it
does not justify and bear out fully what I have now said as
illustrating a certain side and a strange uncertain limitation in
Stevenson:

“But it is not alone in scenery and
architecture that we count England foreign.  The
constitution of society, the very pillars of the empire, surprise
and even pain us.  The dull neglected peasant, sunk in
matter, insolent, gross and servile, makes a startling contrast
to our own long-legged, long-headed, thoughtful, Bible-loving
ploughman.  A week or two in such a place as Suffolk leaves
the Scotsman gasping.  It seems impossible that within the
boundaries of his own island a class should have been thus
forgotten.  Even the educated and intelligent who hold our
own opinions and speak in our own words, yet seem to hold them
with a difference or from another reason, and to speak on all
things with less interest and conviction.  The first shock
of English society is like a cold plunge.” [8]

As there was a great deal of the “John Bull
element” [9] in the little dreamer De Quincey, so
there was a great deal, after all, of the rather conceited
Calvinistic Scot in R. L. Stevenson, and it is to be traced as
clearly in certain of his fictions as anywhere, though he himself
would not perhaps have seen it and acknowledged it, as I am here
forced now to see it, and to acknowledge it for him.

CHAPTER XVII—PROOFS OF GROWTH

Once again I quote Goethe:

“Natural simplicity and repose are the acme
of art, and hence it follows no youth can be a master.”

It has to be confessed that seldom, if ever, does Stevenson
naturally and by sheer enthusiasm for subject and characters
attain this natural simplicity, if he often attained the
counterfeit presentment—artistic and graceful euphony, and
new, subtle, and often unexpected concatenations of phrase. 
Style is much; but it is not everything.  We often love
Scott the more that he shows loosenesses and lapses here, for, in
spite of them, he gains natural simplicity, while not seldom
Stevenson, with all his art and fine sense of verbal music,
rather misses it.  The Sedulous Ape sometimes
disenchants as well as charms; for occasionally a word, a touch,
a turn, sends us off too directly in search of the model; and
this operates against the interest as introducing a new and alien
series of associations, where, for full effect, it should not be
so.  And this distraction will be the more insistent, the
more knowledge the reader has and the more he remembers; and
since Stevenson’s first appeal, both by his spirit and his
methods, is to the cultured and well read, rather than to the
great mass, his “sedulous apehood” only the more
directly wars against him as regards deep, continuous, and
lasting impression; where he should be most simple, natural and
spontaneous; he also is most artificial and involved.  If
the story-writer is not so much in earnest, not so possessed by
his matter that this is allowed to him, how is it to be hoped
that we shall be possessed in the reading of it?  More than
once in Catriona we must own we had this experience,
directly warring against full possession by the story, and
certain passages about Simon Lovat were especially marked by
this; if even the first introduction to Catriona herself was not
so.  As for Miss Barbara Grant, of whom so much has been
made by many admirers, she is decidedly clever, indeed too clever
by half, and yet her doom is to be a mere deus ex
machinâ, and never do more than just pay a little
tribute to Stevenson’s own power of persiflage, or,
if you like, to pay a penalty, poor lass, for the too perfect
doing of hat, and really, really, I could not help saying this
much, though, I do believe that she deserved just a wee bit
better fate than that.

But we have proofs of great growth, and nowhere are they
greater than at the very close.  Stevenson died young: in
some phases he was but a youth to the last.  To a true
critic then, the problem is, having already attained so
much—a grand style, grasp of a limited group of characters,
with fancy, sincerity, and imagination,—what would
Stevenson have attained in another ten years had such been but
allotted him?  It has over and over again been said that,
for long he shied presenting women altogether.  This
is not quite true: Thrawn Janet was an earlier effort; and
if there the problem is persistent, the woman is real.  Here
also he was on the right road—the advance road.  The
sex-question was coming forward as inevitably a part of life, and
could not be left out in any broad and true picture.  This
element was effectively revived in Weir of Hermiston, and
“Weir” has been well said to be sadder, if it does
not go deeper than Denis Duval or Edwin
Drood.  We know what Dickens and Thackeray could do
there; we can but guess now what Stevenson would have done. 
“Weir” is but a fragment; but, to a wisely critical
and unprejudiced mind, it suffices to show not only what the
complete work would have been, but what would have inevitably
followed it.  It shows the turning-point, and the way that
was to be followed at the cross-roads—the way into a
bigger, realer, grander world, where realism, freed from the
dream, and fancy, and prejudice of youth, would glory in
achieving the more enduring romance of manhood, maturity and
humanity.

Yes; there was growth—undoubted growth.  The
questioning and severely moral element mainly due to the Shorter
Catechism—the tendency to casuistry, and to problems, and
wistful introspection—which had so coloured
Stevenson’s art up to the date of The Master of
Ballantrae, and made him a great essayist, was passing in the
satisfaction of assured insight into life itself.  The art
would gradually have been transformed also.  The problem,
pure and simple, would have been subdued in face of the great
facts of life; if not lost, swallowed up in the grandeur, pathos,
and awe of the tragedy clearly realised and presented.

CHAPTER XVIII—EARLIER DETERMINATIONS AND RESULTS

Stevenson’s earlier determination was so distinctly to
the symbolic, the parabolic, allegoric, dreamy and
mystical—to treatment of the world as an array of weird or
half-fanciful existences, witnessing only to certain dim
spiritual facts or abstract moralities, occasionally inverted
moralities—“tail foremost moralities” as later
he himself named them—that a strong Celtic strain in him
had been detected and dwelt on by acute critics long before any
attention had been given to his genealogy on both sides of the
house.  The strong Celtic strain is now amply attested by
many researches.  Such phantasies as The House of
Eld, The Touchstone, The Poor Thing, and The
Song of the Morrow, published along with some fables at the
end of an edition of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, by
Longman’s, I think, in 1896, tell to the initiated as
forcibly as anything could tell of the presence of this element,
as though moonshine, disguising and transfiguring, was laid over
all real things and the secret of the world and life was in its
glamour: the shimmering and soft shading rendering all outlines
indeterminate, though a great idea is felt to be present in the
mind of the author, for which he works.  The man who would
say there is no feeling for symbol—no phantasy or Celtic
glamour in these weird, puzzling, and yet on all sides suggestive
tales would thereby be declared inept, inefficient—blind to
certain qualities that lie near to grandeur in fanciful
literature, or the literature of phantasy, more properly.

This power in weird and playful phantasy is accompanied with
the gift of impersonating or embodying mere abstract qualities or
tendencies in characters.  The little early sketch written
in June 1875, titled Good Content, well illustrates
this:

“Pleasure goes by piping: Hope unfurls his
purple flag; and meek Content follows them on a snow-white
ass.  Here, the broad sunlight falls on open ways and goodly
countries; here, stage by stage, pleasant old towns and hamlets
border the road, now with high sign-poles, now with high minster
spires; the lanes go burrowing under blossomed banks, green
meadows, and deep woods encompass them about; from wood to wood
flock the glad birds; the vane turns in the variable wind; and as
I journey with Hope and Pleasure, and quite a company of jolly
personifications, who but the lady I love is by my side, and
walks with her slim hand upon my arm?

“Suddenly, at a corner, something beckons; a phantom
finger-post, a will o’ the wisp, a foolish challenge writ
in big letters on a brand.  And twisting his red moustaches,
braggadocio Virtue takes the perilous way where dim rain falls
ever, and sad winds sigh.  And after him, on his white ass,
follows simpering Content.

“Ever since I walk behind these two in the rain. 
Virtue is all a-cold; limp are his curling feather and fierce
moustache.  Sore besmirched, on his jackass, follows
Content.”

The record, entitled Sunday Thoughts, which is dated
some five days earlier is naïve and most characteristic,
touched with the phantastic moralities and suggestions already
indicated in every sentence; and rises to the fine climax in this
respect at the close.

“A plague o’ these Sundays!  How
the church bells ring up the sleeping past!  I cannot go in
to sermon: memories ache too hard; and so I hide out under the
blue heavens, beside the small kirk whelmed in leaves. 
Tittering country girls see me as I go past from where they sit
in the pews, and through the open door comes the loud psalm and
the fervent solitary voice of the preacher.  To and fro I
wander among the graves, and now look over one side of the
platform and see the sunlit meadow where the grown lambs go
bleating and the ewes lie in the shadow under their heaped
fleeces; and now over the other, where the rhododendrons flower
fair among the chestnut boles, and far overhead the chestnut
lifts its thick leaves and spiry blossom into the dark-blue
air.  Oh, the height and depth and thickness of the chestnut
foliage!  Oh, to have wings like a dove, and dwell in the
tree’s green heart!

. . . . . . . .

“A plague o’ these Sundays!  How the Church
bells ring up the sleeping past!  Here has a maddening
memory broken into my brain.  To the door, to the door, with
the naked lunatic thought!  Once it is forth we may talk of
what we dare not entertain; once the intriguing thought has been
put to the door I can watch it out of the loophole where, with
its fellows, it raves and threatens in dumb show.  Years ago
when that thought was young, it was dearer to me than all others,
and I would speak with it always when I had an hour alone. 
These rags that so dismally trick forth its madness were once the
splendid livery my favour wrought for it on my bed at
night.  Can you see the device on the badge?  I dare
not read it there myself, yet have a guess—‘bad
ware nicht’—is not that the humour of it?

. . . . . . . . .

“A plague o’ these Sundays!  How the Church
bells ring up the sleeping past!  If I were a dove and dwelt
in the monstrous chestnuts, where the bees murmur all day about
the flowers; if I were a sheep and lay on the field there under
my comely fleece; if I were one of the quiet dead in the
kirkyard—some homespun farmer dead for a long age, some
dull hind who followed the plough and handled the sickle for
threescore years and ten in the distant past; if I were anything
but what I am out here, under the sultry noon, between the deep
chestnuts, among the graves, where the fervent voice of the
preacher comes to me, thin and solitary, through the open
windows; if I were what I was yesterday, and what,
before God, I shall be again to-morrow, how
should I outface these brazen memories, how live down this
unclean resurrection of dead hopes!”

Close associated with this always is the moralising faculty,
which is assertive.  Take here the cunning sentences on
Selfishness and Egotism, very Hawthornian yet quite
original:

“An unconscious, easy, selfish person shocks
less, and is more easily loved, than one who is laboriously and
egotistically unselfish.  There is at least no fuss about
the first; but the other parades his sacrifices, and so sells his
favours too dear.  Selfishness is calm, a force of nature;
you might say the trees were selfish.  But egotism is a
piece of vanity; it must always take you into its confidence; it
is uneasy, troublesome, seeking; it can do good, but not
handsomely; it is uglier, because less dignified, than
selfishness itself.”

If Mr Henley had but had this clear in his mind he might well
have quoted it in one connection against Stevenson himself in the
Pall Mall Magazine article.  He could hardly have
quoted anything more apparently apt to the purpose.

In the sphere of minor morals there is no more important
topic.  Unselfishness is too often only the most
exasperating form of selfishness.  Here is another very
characteristic bit:

“You will always do wrong: you must try to
get used to that, my son.  It is a small matter to make a
work about, when all the world is in the same case.  I meant
when I was a young man to write a great poem; and now I am
cobbling little prose articles and in excellent good
spirits.  I thank you. . . . Our business in life is not to
succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits.”

Again:

“It is the mark of good action that it
appears inevitable in the retrospect.  We should have been
cut-throats to do otherwise.  And there’s an
end.  We ought to know distinctly that we are damned for
what we do wrong; but when we have done right, we have only been
gentlemen, after all.  There is nothing to make a work
about.”

The moral to The House of Eld is incisive writ out of
true experience—phantasy there becomes solemn, if not, for
the nonce, tragic:—

“Old is the tree and the fruit good,
Very old and thick the wood.
Woodman, is your courage stout?
Beware! the root is wrapped about
Your mother’s heart, your father’s bones;
And, like the mandrake, comes with groans.”

The phantastic moralist is supreme, jauntily serious,
facetiously earnest, most gravely funny in the whole series of
Moral Emblems.

“Reader, your soul upraise to see,
In yon fair cut designed by me,
The pauper by the highwayside
Vainly soliciting from pride.
Mark how the Beau with easy air
Contemns the anxious rustic’s prayer
And casting a disdainful eye
Goes gaily gallivanting by.
He from the poor averts his head . . .
He will regret it when he’s dead.”

Now, the man who would trace out step by step and point by
point, clearly and faithfully, the process by which Stevenson
worked himself so far free of this his besetting tendency to
moralised symbolism or allegory into the freer air of life and
real character, would do more to throw light on Stevenson’s
genius, and the obstacles he had had to contend with in becoming
a novelist eager to interpret definite times and character, than
has yet been done or even faithfully attempted.  This would
show at once Stevenson’s wonderful growth and the saving
grace and elasticity of his temperament and genius.  Few men
who have by force of native genius gone into allegory or
moralised phantasy ever depart out of that fateful and enchanted
region.  They are as it were at once lost and imprisoned in
it and kept there as by a spell—the more they struggle for
freedom the more surely is the bewitching charm laid upon
them—they are but like the fly in amber.  It was so
with Ludwig Tieck; it was so with Nathaniel Hawthorne; it was so
with our own George MacDonald, whose professedly real pictures of
life are all informed of this phantasy, which spoils them for
what they profess to be, and yet to the discerning cannot
disguise what they really are—the attempts of a mystic poet
and phantasy writer and allegoristic moralist to walk in the ways
of Anthony Trollope or of Mrs Oliphant, and, like a stranger in a
new land always looking back (at least by a side-glance, an
averted or half-averted face which keeps him from seeing steadily
and seeing whole the real world with which now he is fain to
deal), to the country from which he came.

Stevenson did largely free himself, that is his great
achievement—had he lived, we verily believe, so marked was
his progress, he would have been a great and true realist, a
profound interpreter of human life and its tragic laws and
wondrous compensations—he would have shown how to make the
full retreat from fairyland without penalty of too early an
escape from it, as was the case with Thomas the Rymer of
Ercildoune, and with one other told of by him, and proved that to
have been a dreamer need not absolutely close the door to insight
into the real world and to art.  This side of the subject,
never even glanced at by Mr Henley or Mr Zangwill or their
confrères, yet demands, and will well reward the
closest and most careful attention and thought that can be given
to it.

The parabolic element, with the whimsical humour and turn for
paradoxical inversion, comes out fully in such a work as Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde.  There his humour gives body to his
fancy, and reality to the half-whimsical forms in which he
embodies the results of deep and earnest speculations on human
nature and motive.  But even when he is professedly
concerned with incident and adventure merely, he manages to
communicate to his pages some touch of universality, as of
unconscious parable or allegory, so that the reader feels now and
then as though some thought, or motive, or aspiration, or
weakness of his own were being there cunningly unveiled or
presented; and not seldom you feel he has also unveiled and
presented some of yours, secret and unacknowledged too.

Hence the interest which young and old alike have felt in
Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The
Wrecker—a something which suffices decisively to mark
off these books from the mass with which superficially they might
be classed.

CHAPTER XIX—EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN’S
ESTIMATE

It should be clearly remembered that Stevenson died at a
little over forty—the age at which severity and simplicity
and breadth in art but begin to be attained.  If Scott had
died at the age when Stevenson was taken from us, the world would
have lacked the Waverley Novels; if a like fate had
overtaken Dickens, we should not have had A Tale of Two
Cities; and under a similar stroke, Goldsmith could not have
written Retaliation, or tasted the bitter-sweet first
night of She Stoops to Conquer.  At the age of
forty-four Mr Thomas Hardy had probably not dreamt of Tess of
the D’Urbervilles.  But what a man has already
done at forty years is likely, I am afraid, to be a gauge as well
as a promise of what he will do in the future; and from Stevenson
we were entitled to expect perfect form and continued variety of
subject, rather than a measurable dynamic gain.

This is the point of view which my friend and correspondent of
years ago, Mr Edmund Clarence Stedman, of New York, set out by
emphasising in his address, as President of the meeting under the
auspices of the Uncut Leaves Society in New York, in the
beginning of 1895, on the death of Stevenson, and to honour the
memory of the great romancer, as reported in the New York
Tribune:

“We are brought together by tidings, almost
from the Antipodes, of the death of a beloved writer in his early
prime.  The work of a romancer and poet, of a man of insight
and feeling, which may be said to have begun but fifteen years
ago, has ended, through fortune’s sternest cynicism, just
as it seemed entering upon even more splendid achievement. 
A star surely rising, as we thought, has suddenly gone out. 
A radiant invention shines no more; the voice is hushed of a
creative mind, expressing its fine imagining in this, our
peerless English tongue.  His expression was so original and
fresh from Nature’s treasure-house, so prodigal and
various, its too brief flow so consummate through an inborn gift
made perfect by unsparing toil, that mastery of the art by which
Robert Louis Stevenson conveyed those imaginings to us so
picturesque, yet wisely ordered, his own romantic life—and
now, at last, so pathetic a loss which renews

“‘The Virgilian cry,
The sense of tears in mortal things,’

that this assemblage has gathered at the first summons, in
tribute to a beautiful genius, and to avow that with the putting
out of that bright intelligence the reading world experiences a
more than wonted grief.

“Judged by the sum of his interrupted work, Stevenson
had his limitations.  But the work was adjusted to the scale
of a possibly long career.  As it was, the good fairies
brought all gifts, save that of health, to his cradle, and the
gift-spoiler wrapped them in a shroud.  Thinking of what his
art seemed leading to—for things that would be the crowning
efforts of other men seemed prentice-work in his case—it
was not safe to bound his limitations.  And now it is as if
Sir Walter, for example, had died at forty-four, with the
Waverley Novels just begun!  In originality, in the
conception of action and situation, which, however phantastic,
are seemingly within reason, once we breathe the air of his
Fancyland; in the union of bracing and heroic character and
adventure; in all that belongs to tale-writing pure and simple,
his gift was exhaustless.  No other such charmer, in this
wise, has appeared in his generation.  We thought the
stories, the fairy tales, had all been told, but ‘Once upon
a time’ meant for him our own time, and the grave and gay
magic of Prince Florizel in dingy London or sunny France. 
All this is but one of his provinces, however distinctive. 
Besides, how he buttressed his romance with apparent truth! 
Since Defoe, none had a better right to say: ‘There was one
thing I determined to do when I began this long story, and that
was to tell out everything as it befell.’

“I remember delighting in two fascinating stories of
Paris in the time of François Villon, anonymously
reprinted by a New York paper from a London magazine.  They
had all the quality, all the distinction, of which I speak. 
Shortly afterward I met Mr Stevenson, then in his twenty-ninth
year, at a London club, where we chanced to be the only loungers
in an upper room.  To my surprise he opened a
conversation—you know there could be nothing more
unexpected than that in London—and thereby I guessed that
he was as much, if not as far, away from home as I was.  He
asked many questions concerning ‘the States’; in
fact, this was but a few months before he took his steerage
passage for our shores.  I was drawn to the young Scotsman
at once.  He seemed more like a New-Englander of
Holmes’s Brahmin caste, who might have come from Harvard or
Yale.  But as he grew animated I thought, as others have
thought, and as one would suspect from his name, that he must
have Scandinavian blood in his veins—that he was of the
heroic, restless, strong and tender Viking strain, and certainly
from that day his works and wanderings have not belied the
surmise.  He told me that he was the author of that charming
book of gipsying in the Cevennes which just then had gained for
him some attentions from the literary set.  But if I had
known that he had written those two stories of sixteenth-century
Paris—as I learned afterwards when they reappeared in the
New Arabian Nights—I would not have bidden him
good-bye as to an ‘unfledged comrade,’ but would have
wished indeed to ‘grapple him to my soul with hooks of
steel.’

“Another point is made clear as crystal by his life
itself.  He had the instinct, and he had the courage, to
make it the servant, and not the master, of the faculty within
him.  I say he had the courage, but so potent was his
birth-spell that doubtless he could not otherwise.  Nothing
commonplace sufficed him.  A regulation stay-at-home life
would have been fatal to his art.  The ancient mandate,
‘Follow thy Genius,’ was well obeyed. 
Unshackled freedom of person and habit was a prerequisite; as an
imaginary artist he felt—nature keeps her poets and
story-tellers children to the last—he felt, if he ever
reasoned it out, that he must gang his own gait, whether it
seemed promising, or the reverse, to kith, kin, or alien. 
So his wanderings were not only in the most natural but in the
wisest consonance with his creative dreams.  Wherever he
went, he found something essential for his use, breathed upon it,
and returned it fourfold in beauty and worth.  The longing
of the Norseman for the tropic, of the pine for the palm, took
him to the South Seas.  There, too, strange secrets were at
once revealed to him, and every island became an ‘Isle of
Voices.’  Yes, an additional proof of
Stevenson’s artistic mission lay in his careless, careful,
liberty of life; in that he was an artist no less than in his
work.  He trusted to the impulse which possessed
him—that which so many of us have conscientiously disobeyed
and too late have found ourselves in reputable bondage to
circumstances.

“But those whom you are waiting to hear will speak more
fully of all this—some of them with the interest of their
personal remembrance—with the strength of their affection
for the man beloved by young and old.  In the strange and
sudden intimacy with an author’s record which death makes
sure, we realise how notable the list of Stevenson’s works
produced since 1878; more than a score of books—not fiction
alone, but also essays, criticism, biography, drama, even
history, and, as I need not remind you, that spontaneous poetry
which comes only from a true poet.  None can have failed to
observe that, having recreated the story of adventure, he seemed
in his later fiction to interfuse a subtler purpose—the
search for character, the analysis of mind and soul.  Just
here his summons came.  Between the sunrise of one day and
the sunset of the next he exchanged the forest study for the
mountain grave.  There, as he had sung his own wish, he lies
‘under the wide and starry sky.’  If there was
something of his own romance, so exquisitely capricious, in the
life of Robert Louis Stevenson, so, also, the poetic conditions
are satisfied in his death, and in the choice of his burial-place
upon the top of Pala.  As for the splendour of that maturity
upon which we counted, now never to be fulfilled on sea or land,
I say—as once before, when the great New-England romancer
passed in the stillness of the night:

“‘What though his work unfinished lies?  Half
bent
The rainbow’s arch fades out in upper air,
   The shining cataract half-way down the height
Breaks into mist; the haunting strain, that fell
      On listeners unaware,
   Ends incomplete, but through the starry night
The ear still waits for what it did not tell.’”

Dr Edward Eggleston finely sounded the personal note, and told
of having met Stevenson at a hotel in New York.  Stevenson
was ill when the landlord came to Dr Eggleston and asked him if
he should like to meet him.  Continuing, he said:

“He was flat on his back when I entered, but
I think I never saw anybody grow well in so short a time. 
It was a soul rather than a body that lay there, ablaze with
spiritual fire, good will shining through everywhere.  He
did not pay me any compliment about my work, and I didn’t
pay him any about his.  We did not burn any of the incense
before each other which authors so often think it necessary to
do, but we were friends instantly.  I am not given to speedy
intimacies, but I could not help my heart going out to him. 
It was a wonderfully invested soul, no hedges or fences across
his fields, no concealment.  He was a romanticist; I
was—well, I don’t know exactly what.  But he let
me into the springs of his romanticism then and there.

“‘You go in your boat every day?’ he
asked.  ‘You sail?  Oh! to write a novel a man
must take his life in his hands.  He must not live in the
town.’  And so he spoke, in his broad way, of course,
according to the enthusiasm of the moment.

“I can’t sound any note of pathos here
to-night.  Some lives are so brave and sweet and joyous and
well-rounded, with such a completeness about them that death does
not leave imperfection.  He never had the air of sitting up
with his own reputation.  He let his books toss in the waves
of criticism and make their ports if they deserve to.  He
had no claptrap, no great cause, none of the disease of pruriency
which came into fashion with Flaubert and Guy de
Maupassant.  He simply told his story, with no
condescension, taking the readers into his heart and his
confidence.”

CHAPTER XX—EGOTISTIC ELEMENT AND ITS EFFECTS

From these sources now traced out by us—his youthfulness
of spirit, his mystical bias, and tendency to
dream—symbolisms leading to disregard of common
feelings—flows too often the indeterminateness of
Stevenson’s work, at the very points where for direct
interest there should be decision.  In The Master of
Ballantrae this leads him to try to bring the balances even
as regards our interest in the two brothers, in so far justifying
from one point of view what Mr Zangwill said in the quotation we
have given, or, as Sir Leslie Stephen had it in his second series
of the Studies of a Biographer:

“The younger brother in The Master of
Ballantrae, who is black-mailed by the utterly reprobate
master, ought surely to be interesting instead of being simply
sullen and dogged.  In the later adventures, we are invited
to forgive him on the ground that his brain has been affected:
but the impression upon me is that he is sacrificed throughout to
the interests of the story [or more strictly for the working out
of the problem as originally conceived by the author].  The
curious exclusion of women is natural in the purely boyish
stories, since to a boy woman is simply an incumbrance upon
reasonable modes of life.  When in Catriona Stevenson
introduces a love story, it is still unsatisfactory, because
David Balfour is so much the undeveloped animal that his passion
is clumsy, and his charm for the girl unintelligible.  I
cannot feel, to say the truth, that in any of these stories I am
really among living human beings with whom, apart from their
adventures, I can feel any very lively affection or
antipathy.”

In the Ebb-Tide it is, in this respect, yet worse: the
three heroes choke each other off all too literally.

In his excess of impartiality he tones down the points and
lines that would give the attraction of true individuality to his
characters, and instead, would fain have us contented with his
liberal, and even over-sympathetic views of them and allowances
for them.  But instead of thus furthering his object, he
sacrifices the whole—and his story becomes, instead of a
broad and faithful human record, really a curiosity of
autobiographic perversion, and of overweening, if not extravagant
egotism of the more refined, but yet over-obtrusive kind.

Mr Baildon thus hits the subjective tendency, out of which
mainly this defect—a serious defect in view of
interest—arises.

“That we can none of us be sure to what
crime we might not descend, if only our temptation were
sufficiently acute, lies at the root of his fondness and
toleration for wrong-doers (p. 74).

Thus he practically declines to do for us what we are
unwilling or unable to do for ourselves.  Interest in two
characters in fiction can never, in this artificial way, and if
they are real characters truly conceived, be made equal, nor can
one element of claim be balanced against another, even at the
beck of the greatest artist.  The common sentiment, as we
have seen, resents it even as it resents lack of guidance
elsewhere.  After all, the novelist is bound to give
guidance: he is an authority in his own world, where he is an
autocrat indeed; and can work out issues as he pleases, even as
the Pope is an authority in the Roman Catholic world: he
abdicates his functions when he declines to lead: we depend on
him from the human point of view to guide us right, according to
the heart, if not according to any conventional notion or
opinion.  Stevenson’s pause in individual presentation
in the desire now to raise our sympathy for the one, and then for
the other in The Master of Ballantrae, admits us too far
into Stevenson’s secret or trick of affected
self-withdrawal in order to work his problem and to signify his
theories, to the loss and utter confusion of his aims from the
point of common dramatic and human interest.  It is the same
in Catriona in much of the treatment of James Mohr or
More; it is still more so in not a little of the treatment of
Weir of Hermiston and his son, though there, happily for
him and for us, there were the direct restrictions of known fact
and history, and clearly an attempt at a truer and broader human
conception unburdened by theory or egotistic conception.

Everywhere the problem due to the desire to be overjust, so to
say, emerges; and exactly in the measure it does so the source of
true dramatic directness and variety is lost.  It is just as
though Shakespeare were to invent a chorus to cry out at
intervals about Iago—“a villain, bad lot, you see,
still there’s a great deal to be said for him—victim
of inheritance, this, that and the other; and considering
everything how could you really expect anything else
now.”  Thackeray was often weak from this same
tendency—he meant Becky Sharp to be largely excused by the
reader on these grounds, as he tries to excuse several others of
his characters; but his endeavours in this way to gloss over
“wickedness” in a way, do not succeed—the
reader does not carry clear in mind as he goes along, the
suggestions Thackeray has ineffectually set out and the
“healthy hatred of scoundrels” Carlyle talked about
has its full play in spite of Thackeray’s suggested excuses
and palliations, and all in his own favour, too, as a
story-wright.

Stevenson’s constant habit of putting himself in the
place of another, and asking himself how would I have borne
myself here or there, thus limited his field of dramatic
interest, where the subject should have been made pre-eminently
in aid of this effect.  Even in Long John Silver we see it,
as in various others of his characters, though there, owing to
the demand for adventure, and action contributory to it, the
defect is not so emphasised.  The sense as of a projection
of certain features of the writer into all and sundry of his
important characters, thus imparts, if not an air of egotism,
then most certainly a somewhat constrained, if not somewhat
artificial, autobiographical air—in the very midst of
action, questions of ethical or casuistical character arise, all
contributing to submerging individual character and its dramatic
interests under a wave of but half-disguised autobiography. 
Let Stevenson do his very best—let him adopt all the
artificial disguises he may, as writing narrative in the first
person, etc., as in Kidnapped and Catriona,
nevertheless, the attentive reader’s mind is constantly
called off to the man who is actually writing the story.  It
is as though, after all, all the artistic or artificial disguises
were a mere mask, as more than once Thackeray represented
himself, the mask partially moved aside, just enough to show a
chubby, childish kind of transformed Thackeray face below. 
This belongs, after all, to the order of self-revelation though
under many disguises: it is creation only in its manner of work,
not in its essential being—the spirit does not so to us go
clean forth of itself, it stops at home, and, as if from a remote
and shadowy cave or recess, projects its own colour on all on
which it looks.

This is essentially the character of the mystic; and
hence the justification for this word as applied expressly to
Stevenson by Mr Chesterton and others.

“The inner life like rings of light
Goes forth of us, transfiguring all we see.”

The effect of these early days, with the peculiar tint due to
the questionings raised by religious stress and strain, persists
with Stevenson; he grows, but he never escapes from that peculiar
something which tells of childish influences—of boyish
perversions and troubled self-examinations due to Shorter
Catechism—any one who would view Stevenson without thought
of this, would view him only from the outside—see him
merely in dress and outer oddities.  Here I see definite and
clear heredity.  Much as he differed from his worthy father
in many things, he was like him in this—the old man like
the son, bore on him the marks of early excesses of wistful
self-questionings and painful wrestlings with religious problems,
that perpetuated themselves in a quaint kind of self-revelation
often masked by an assumed self-withdrawal or indifference which
to the keen eye only the more revealed the real case. 
Stevenson never, any more than his father, ceased to be
interested in the religious questions for which Scotland has
always had a penchant—and so much is this the case
that I could wish Professor Sidney Colvin would even yet attempt
to show the bearing of certain things in that Address to the
Scottish Clergy written when Stevenson was yet but a young
man, on all that he afterwards said and did.  It starts in
the Edinburgh Edition without any note, comment, or
explanation whatever, but in that respect the Edinburgh
Edition is not quite so complete as it might have been
made.  In view of the point now before us, it is far more
important than many of the other trifles there given, and wants
explanation and its relation to much in the novels brought out
and illustrated.  Were this adequately done, only new ground
would be got for holding that Stevenson, instead of, as has been
said, “seeing only the visible world,” was, in truth,
a mystical moralist, once and always, whose thoughts ran all too
easily into parable and fable, and who, indeed, never escaped
wholly from that atmosphere, even when writing of things and
characters that seemed of themselves to be wholly outside that
sphere.  This was the tendency, indeed, that militated
against the complete detachment in his case from moral problems
and mystical thought, so as to enable him to paint, as it were,
with a free hand exactly as he saw; and most certainly not that
he saw only the visible world.  The mystical element is not
directly favourable to creative art.  You see in Tolstoy how
it arrests and perplexes—how it lays a disturbing check on
real presentation—hindering the action, and is not
favourable to the loving and faithful representation, which, as
Goethe said, all true and high art should be.  To some
extent you see exactly the same thing in Nathaniel Hawthorne as
in Tolstoy.  Hawthorne’s preoccupations in this way
militated against his character-power; his healthy characters who
would never have been influenced as he describes by morbid ones
yet are not only influenced according to him, but suffer
sadly.  Phoebe Pyncheon in The House of the Seven
Gables, gives sunshine to poor Hepzibah Clifford, but is
herself never merry again, though joyousness was her natural
element.  So, doubtless, it would have been with Pansie in
Doctor Dolliver, as indeed it was with Zenobia and with
the hero in the Marble Faun.  “We all go
wrong,” said Hawthorne, “by a too strenuous
resolution to go right.”  Lady Byron was to him an
intolerably irreproachable person, just as Stevenson felt a
little of the same towards Thoreau; notwithstanding that he was
the “sunnily-ascetic,” the asceticism and its
corollary, as he puts it: the passion for individual
self-improvement was alien in a way to Stevenson.  This is
the position of the casuistic mystic moralist and not of the man
who sees only the visible world.

Mr Baildon says:

“Stevenson has many of the things that are
wanting or defective in Scott.  He has his philosophy of
life; he is beyond remedy a moralist, even when his morality is
of the kind which he happily calls ‘tail foremost,’
or as we may say, inverted morality.  Stevenson is, in fact,
much more of a thinker than Scott, and he is also much more of
the conscious artist, questionable advantage as that sometimes
is.  He has also a much cleverer, acuter mind than Scott,
also a questionable advantage, as genius has no greater enemy
than cleverness, and there is really no greater descent than to
fall from the style of genius to that of cleverness.  But
Stevenson was too critical and alive to misuse his cleverness,
and it is generally employed with great effect as in the
diabolical ingenuities of a John Silver, or a Master of
Ballantrae.  In one sense Stevenson does not even belong to
the school of Scott, but rather to that of Poe, Hawthorne, and
the Brontës, in that he aims more at concentration and
intensity, than at the easy, quiet breadth of Scott.”

If, indeed, it should not here have been added that
Stevenson’s theory of life and conduct was not seldom too
insistent for free creativeness, for dramatic freedom, breadth
and reality.

Now here I humbly think Mr Baldion errs about the cleverness
when he criticises Stevenson for the faux pas artistically
of resorting to the piratic filibustering and the
treasure-seeking at the close of The Master of Ballantrae,
he only tells and tells plainly how cleverness took the place of
genius there; as indeed it did in not a few cases—certainly
in some points in the Dutch escapade in Catriona and in
not a few in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.  The fault of
that last story is simply that we seem to hear Stevenson
chuckling to himself, “Ah, now, won’t they all say at
last how clever I am.”  That too mars the Merry
Men, whoever wrote them or part wrote them, and Prince
Otto would have been irretrievably spoiled by this
self-conscious sense of cleverness had it not been for style and
artifice.  In this incessant “see how clever I
am,” we have another proof of the abounding youthfulness of
R. L. Stevenson.  If, as Mr Baildon says (p. 30), he had
true child’s horror of being put in fine clothes in which
one must sit still and be good, Prince Otto remains
attractive in spite of some things and because of his fine
clothes.  Neither Poe nor Hawthorne could have fallen to the
piracy, and treasure-hunting of The Master of
Ballantrae.

“Far behind Scott in the power of instinctive,
irreflective, spontaneous creation of character, Stevenson tells
his story with more art and with a firmer grip on his
reader.”  And that is exactly what I, wishing to do
all I dutifully can for Stevenson, cannot see.  His genius
is in nearly all cases pulled up or spoiled by his all too
conscious cleverness, and at last we say, “Oh Heavens! if
he could and would but let himself go or forget himself what he
might achieve.”  But he doesn’t—never
does, and therefore remains but a second-rate creator though more
and more the stylist and the artist.  This is more
especially the case at the very points where writers like Scott
would have risen and roused all the readers’
interest.  When Stevenson reaches such points, he is always
as though saying “See now how cleverly I’ll clear
that old and stereotyped style of thing and do something
new.”  But there are things in life and human
nature, which though they are old are yet ever new, and the true
greatness of a writer can never come from evading or looking
askance at them or trying to make them out something else than
what they really are.  No artistic aim or ambition can
suffice to stand instead of them or to refine them away. 
That way lies only cold artifice and frigid lacework, and
sometimes Stevenson did go a little too much on this line.

CHAPTER XXI—UNITY IN STEVENSON’S STORIES

The unity in Stevenson’s stories is generally a unity of
subjective impression and reminiscence due, in the first place,
to his quick, almost abnormal boyish reverence for mere animal
courage, audacity, and doggedness, and, in the second place, to
his theory of life, his philosophy, his moral view.  He
produces an artificial atmosphere.  Everything then has to
be worked up to this—kept really in accordance with it, and
he shows great art in the doing of this.  Hence, though, a
quaint sense of sameness, of artificial atmosphere—at once
really a lack of spontaneity and of freedom.  He is freest
when he pretends to nothing but adventure—when he aims
professedly at nothing save to let his characters develop
themselves by action.  In this respect the most successful
of his stories is yet Treasure Island, and the least
successful perhaps Catriona, when just as the ambitious
aim compels him to pause in incident, the first-person form
creates a cold stiffness and artificiality alien to the full
impression he would produce upon the reader.  The two
stories he left unfinished promised far greater things in this
respect than he ever accomplished.  For it is an
indisputable fact, and indeed very remarkable, that the ordinary
types of men and women have little or no attraction for
Stevenson, nor their commonplace passions either.  Yet
precisely what his art wanted was due infusion of this very
interest.  Nothing else will supply the place.  The
ordinary passion of love to the end he shies, and must
invent no end of expedients to supply the want.  The
devotion of the ordinary type, as Thomas Hardy has over and over
exhibited it, is precisely what Stevenson wants, to impart to his
novels the full sense of reality.  The secret of morals,
says Shelley, is a going out of self.  Stevenson was only on
the way to secure this grand and all-sufficing motive.  His
characters, in a way, are all already like himself, romantic, but
the highest is when the ordinary and commonplace is so
apprehended that it becomes romantic, and may even, through the
artist’s deeper perception and unconscious grasp and
vision, take the hand of tragedy, and lose nothing.  The
very atmosphere Stevenson so loved to create was in itself alien
to this; and, so far as he went, his most successful revelations
were but records of his own limitations.  It is something
that he was to the end so much the youth, with fine impulses, if
sometimes with sympathies misdirected, and that, too, in such a
way as to render his work cold and artificial, else he might have
turned out more of the Swift than of the Sterne or
Fielding.  Prince Otto and Seraphina are from this cause
mainly complete failures, alike from the point of view of nature
and of art, and the Countess von Rosen is not a complete failure,
and would perhaps have been a bit of a success, if only she had
made Prince Otto come nearer to losing his virtue.  The most
perfect in style, perhaps, of all Stevenson’s efforts it is
yet most out of nature and truth,—a farce, felt to be
disguised only when read in a certain mood; and this all the more
for its perfections, just as Stevenson would have said it of a
human being too icily perfect whom he had met.

On this subject, Mr Baildon has some words so decisive, true,
and final, that I cannot refrain from here quoting them:

“From sheer incapacity to retain it, Prince
Otto loses the regard, affection, and esteem of his wife. 
He goes eavesdropping among the peasantry, and has to sit silent
while his wife’s honour is coarsely impugned.  After
that I hold it is impossible for Stevenson to rehabilitate his
hero, and, with all his brilliant effects, he fails. . . . I
cannot help feeling a regret that such fine work is thrown away
on what I must honestly hold to be an unworthy subject.  The
music of the spheres is rather too sublime an accompaniment for
this genteel comedy Princess.  A touch of Offenbach would
seem more appropriate.  Then even in comedy the hero must
not be the butt.”  And it must reluctantly be
confessed that in Prince Otto you see in excess that to which
there is a tendency in almost all the rest—it is to make up
for lack of hold on human nature itself, by resources of style
and mere external technical art.

CHAPTER XXII—PERSONAL CHEERFULNESS AND INVENTED
GLOOM

Now, it is in its own way surely a very remarkable thing that
Stevenson, who, like a youth, was all for Heiterkeit,
cheerfulness, taking and giving of pleasure, for relief, change,
variety, new impressions, new sensations, should, at the time he
did, have conceived and written a story like The Master of
Ballantrae—all in a grave, grey, sombre tone, not
aiming even generally at what at least indirectly all art is
conceived to aim at—the giving of pleasure: he himself
decisively said that it “lacked all pleasurableness, and
hence was imperfect in essence.”  A very strange
utterance in face of the oft-repeated doctrine of the essays that
the one aim of art, as of true life, is to communicate pleasure,
to cheer and to elevate and improve, and in face of two of his
doctrines that life itself is a monitor to cheerfulness and
mirth.  This is true: and it is only explainable on the
ground that it is youth alone which can exult in its power of
accumulating shadows and dwelling on the dark side—it is
youth that revels in the possible as a set-off to its brightness
and irresponsibility: it is youth that can delight in its own
excess of shade, and can even dispense with
sunshine—hugging to its heart the memory of its own often
self-created distresses and conjuring up and, with
self-satisfaction, brooding over the pain and imagined horrors of
a lifetime.  Maturity and age kindly bring their own
relief—rendering this kind of ministry to itself no longer
desirable, even were it possible.  The Master of
Ballantrae indeed marks the crisis.  It shows, and
effectively shows, the other side of the adventure
passion—the desire of escape from its own sombre
introspections, which yet, in all its “go” and glow
and glitter, tells by its very excess of their tendency to pass
into this other and apparently opposite.  But here, too,
there is nothing single or separate.  The device of piracy,
etc., at close of Ballantrae, is one of the poorest
expedients for relief in all fiction.

Will in Will o’ the Mill presents another. 
When at the last moment he decides that it is not worth while to
get married, the author’s then rather incontinent
philosophy—which, by-the-bye, he did not himself act
on—spoils his story as it did so much else.  Such an
ending to such a romance is worse even than any blundering such
as the commonplace inventor could be guilty of, for he would be
in a low sense natural if he were but commonplace.  We need
not therefore be surprised to find Mr Gwynn thus writing:

“The love scenes in Weir of Hermiston
are almost unsurpassable; but the central interest of the story
lies elsewhere—in the relations between father and
son.  Whatever the cause, the fact is clear that in the last
years of his life Stevenson recognised in himself an ability to
treat subjects which he had hitherto avoided, and was thus no
longer under the necessity of detaching fragments from
life.  Before this, he had largely confined himself to the
adventures of roving men where women had made no entrance; or, if
he treated of a settled family group, the result was what we see
in The Master of Ballantrae.”

In a word, between this work and Weir of Hermiston we
have the passage from mere youth to manhood, with its wider,
calmer views, and its patience, inclusiveness, and mild, genial
acceptance of types that before did not come, and could not by
any effort of will be brought, within range or made to adhere
consistently with what was already accepted and workable. 
He was less the egotist now and more the realist.  He was
not so prone to the high lights in which all seems overwrought,
exaggerated; concerned really with effects of a more subdued
order, if still the theme was a wee out of ordinary nature. 
Enough is left to prove that Stevenson’s life-long devotion
to his art anyway was on the point of being rewarded by such a
success as he had always dreamt of: that in the man’s
nature there was power to conceive scenes of a tragic beauty and
intensity unsurpassed in our prose literature, and to create
characters not unworthy of his greatest predecessors.  The
blind stroke of fate had nothing to say to the lesson of his
life, and though we deplore that he never completed his
masterpieces, we may at least be thankful that time enough was
given him to prove to his fellow-craftsmen, that such labour for
the sake of art is not without art’s peculiar
reward—the triumph of successful execution.

CHAPTER XXIII—EDINBURGH REVIEWERS’ DICTA
INAPPLICABLE TO LATER WORK

From many different points of view discerning critics have
celebrated the autobiographic vein—the self-revealing turn,
the self-portraiture, the quaint, genial, yet really child-like
egotistic and even dreamy element that lies like an amalgam,
behind all Stevenson’s work.  Some have even said,
that because of this, he will finally live by his essays and not
by his stories.  That is extreme, and is not critically
based or justified, because, however true it may be up to a
certain point, it is not true of Stevenson’s quite latest
fictions where we see a decided breaking through of the old
limits, and an advance upon a new and a fresher and broader
sphere of interest and character altogether.  But these
ideas set down truly enough at a certain date, or prior to a
certain date, are wrong and falsely directed in view of
Stevenson’s latest work and what it promised.  For
instance, what a discerning and able writer in the Edinburgh
Review of July 1895 said truly then was in great part utterly
inapplicable to the whole of the work of the last years, for in
it there was grasp, wide and deep, of new
possibilities—promise of clear insight, discrimination, and
contrast of character, as well as firm hold of new and great
human interest under which the egotistic or autobiographic vein
was submerged or weakened.  The Edinburgh Reviewer
wrote:

“There was irresistible fascination in what
it would be unfair to characterise as egotism, for it came
natural to him to talk frankly and easily of himself. . . . He
could never have dreamed, like Pepys, of locking up his
confidence in a diary.  From first to last, in inconsecutive
essays, in the records of sentimental touring, in fiction and in
verse, he has embodied the outer and the inner
autobiography.  He discourses—he prattles—he
almost babbles about himself.  He seems to have taken minute
and habitual introspection for the chief study in his analysis of
human nature, as a subject which was immediately in his reach,
and would most surely serve his purpose.  We suspect much of
the success of his novels was due to the fact that as he seized
for a substructure on the scenery and situations which had
impressed him forcibly, so in the characters of the most
different types, there was always more or less of
self-portraiture.  The subtle touch, eminently and
unmistakably realistic, gave life to what might otherwise have
seemed a lay-figure. . . . He hesitated again and again as to his
destination; and under mistakes, advice of friends, doubted his
chances, as a story-writer, even after Treasure Island had
enjoyed its special success. . . . We venture to think that, with
his love of intellectual self-indulgence, had he found
novel-writing really enjoyable, he would never have doubted at
all.  But there comes in the difference between him and
Scott, whom he condemns for the slovenliness of hasty
workmanship.  Scott, in his best days, sat down to his desk
and let the swift pen take its course in inspiration that seemed
to come without an effort.  Even when racked with pains, and
groaning in agony, the intellectual machinery was still driven at
a high pressure by something that resembled an irrepressible
instinct.  Stevenson can have had little or nothing of that
inspiriting afflatus.  He did his painstaking work
conscientiously, thoughtfully; he erased, he revised, and he was
hard to satisfy.  In short, it was his weird—and he
could not resist it—to set style and form before fire and
spirit.”

CHAPTER XXIV—MR HENLEY’S SPITEFUL
PERVERSIONS

More unfortunate still, as disturbing and prejudicing a sane
and true and disinterested view of Stevenson’s claims, was
that article of his erewhile “friend,” Mr W. E.
Henley, published on the appearance of the Memoir by Mr
Graham Balfour, in the Pall Mall Magazine.  It was
well that Mr Henley there acknowledged frankly that he wrote
under a keen sense of “grievance”—a most
dangerous mood for the most soberly critical and self-restrained
of men to write in, and that most certainly Mr W. E. Henley was
not—and that he owned to having lost contact with, and
recognition of the R. L. Stevenson who went to America in 1887,
as he says, and never came back again.  To do bare justice
to Stevenson it is clear that knowledge of that later Stevenson
was essential—essential whether it was calculated to deepen
sympathy or the reverse.  It goes without saying that the
Louis he knew and hobnobbed with, and nursed near by the Old
Bristo Port in Edinburgh could not be the same exactly as the
Louis of Samoa and later years—to suppose so, or to expect
so, would simply be to deny all room for growth and
expansion.  It is clear that the W. E. Henley of those days
was not the same as the W. E. Henley who indited that article,
and if growth and further insight are to be allowed to Mr Henley
and be pleaded as his justification cum spite born of
sense of grievance for such an onslaught, then clearly some
allowance in the same direction must be made for Stevenson. 
One can hardly think that in his case old affection and
friendship had been so completely submerged, under feelings of
grievance and paltry pique, almost always bred of grievances
dwelt on and nursed, which it is especially bad for men of genius
to acknowledge, and to make a basis, as it were, for clearer
knowledge, insight, and judgment.  In other cases the
pleading would simply amount to an immediate and complete arrest
of judgment.  Mr Henley throughout writes as though whilst
he had changed, and changed in points most essential, his
erewhile friend remained exactly where he was as to literary
position and product—the Louis who went away in 1887 and
never returned, had, as Mr W. E. Henley, most unfortunately for
himself, would imply, retained the mastery, and the Louis who
never came back had made no progress, had not added an inch, not
to say a cubit, to his statue, while Mr Henley remained in
statu quo, and was so only to be judged.  It is an
instance of the imperfect sympathy which Charles Lamb finely
celebrated—only here it is acknowledged, and the
“imperfect sympathy” pled as a ground for claiming
the full insight which only sympathy can secure.  If Mr
Henley was fair to the Louis he knew and loved, it is clear that
he was and could only be unjust to the Louis who went away in
1887 and never came back.

“At bottom Stevenson was an excellent
fellow.  But he was of his essence what the French call
personnel.  He was, that is, incessantly and
passionately interested in Stevenson.  He could not be in
the same room with a mirror but he must invite its confidences
every time he passed it; to him there was nothing obvious in time
and eternity, and the smallest of his discoveries, his most
trivial apprehensions, were all by way of being revelations, and
as revelations must be thrust upon the world; he was never so
much in earnest, never so well pleased (this were he happy or
wretched), never so irresistible as when he wrote about
himself.  Withal, if he wanted a thing, he
went after it with an entire contempt of consequences. 
For these, indeed, the Shorter Catechism was
ever prepared to answer; so that whether he did well or
ill, he was safe to come out unabashed and
cheerful.”

Notice here, how undiscerning the mentor becomes.  The
words put in “italics,” unqualified as they are,
would fit and admirably cover the character of the greatest
criminal.  They would do as they stand, for Wainwright, for
Dr Dodd, for Deeming, for Neil Cream, for Canham Read, or for
Dougal of Moat Farm fame.  And then the touch that, in the
Shorter Catechism, Stevenson would have found a cover or
justification for it somehow!  This comes of writing under a
keen sense of grievance; and how could this be truly said of one
who was “at bottom an excellent fellow.”  W.
Henley’s ethics are about as clear-obscure as is his
reading of character.  Listen to him once again—more
directly on the literary point.

“To tell the truth, his books are none of
mine; I mean that if I wanted reading, I do not go for it to the
Edinburgh Edition.  I am not interested in remarks
about morals; in and out of letters.  I have lived a full
and varied life, and my opinions are my own.  So,
if I crave the enchantment of romance, I ask it of
bigger men than he, and of bigger books than his: of
Esmond (say) and Great Expectations, of
Redgauntlet and Old Mortality, of La Reine
Margot and Bragelonne, of David Copperfield and
A Tale of Two Cities; while if good writing and some other
things be in my appetite, are there not always Hazlitt and
Lamb—to say nothing of that globe of miraculous continents;
which is known to us as Shakespeare?  There is his style,
you will say, and it is a fact that it is rare, and in the
last times better, because much simpler than in the
first.  But, after all, his style is so perfectly achieved
that the achievement gets obvious: and when achievement gets
obvious, is it not by way of becoming uninteresting?  And is
there not something to be said for the person who wrote that
Stevenson always reminded him of a young man dressed the best he
ever saw for the Burlington Arcade? [10] 
Stevenson’s work in letters does not now take me much, and
I decline to enter on the question of his immortality; since
that, despite what any can say, will get itself settled soon or
late, for all time.  No—when I care to think of
Stevenson it is not of R. L. Stevenson—R. L. Stevenson, the
renowned, the accomplished—executing his difficult solo,
but of the Lewis that I knew and loved, and wrought for, and
worked with for so long.  The successful man of letters does
not greatly interest me.  I read his careful prayers and
pass on, with the certainty that, well as they read, they were
not written for print.  I learn of his nameless
prodigalities, and recall some instances of conduct in another
vein.  I remember, rather, the unmarried and irresponsible
Lewis; the friend, the comrade, the charmeur.  Truly,
that last word, French as it is, is the only one that is worthy
of him.  I shall ever remember him as that.  The
impression of his writings disappears; the impression of himself
and his talk is ever a possession. . . . Forasmuch as he was
primarily a talker, his printed works, like these of others after
his kind, are but a sop for posterity.  A last dying speech
and confession (as it were) to show that not for nothing were
they held rare fellows in their day.”

Just a month or two before Mr Henley’s self-revealing
article appeared in the Pall Mall Magazine, Mr Chesterton,
in the Daily News, with almost prophetic forecast, had
said:

“Mr Henley might write an excellent study of
Stevenson, but it would only be of the Henleyish part of
Stevenson, and it would show a distinct divergence from the
finished portrait of Stevenson, which would be given by Professor
Colvin.”

And it were indeed hard to reconcile some things here with
what Mr Henley set down of individual works many times in the
Scots and National Observer, and elsewhere, and in
literary judgments as in some other things there should, at
least, be general consistency, else the search for an honest man
in the late years would be yet harder than it was when Diogenes
looked out from his tub!

Mr James Douglas, in the Star, in his half-playful and
suggestive way, chose to put it as though he regarded the article
in the Pall Mall Magazine as a hoax, perpetrated by some
clever, unscrupulous writer, intent on provoking both Mr Henley
and his friends, and Stevenson’s friends and
admirers.  This called forth a letter from one signing
himself “A Lover of R. L. Stevenson,” which is so
good that we must give it here.

A LITERARY HOAX.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE STAR.

Sir—I fear that, despite the
charitable scepticism of Mr Douglas, there is no doubt that Mr
Henley is the perpetrator of the saddening Depreciation of
Stevenson which has been published over his name.

What openings there are for reprisals let Mr Henley’s
conscience tell him; but permit me to remind him of two or three
things which R. L. Stevenson has written concerning W. E.
Henley.

First this scene in the infirmary at Edinburgh:

“(Leslie) Stephen and I sat on a couple of chairs, and
the poor fellow (Henley) sat up in his bed with his hair and
beard all tangled, and talked as cheerfully as if he had been in
a king’s palace, or the great King’s palace of the
blue air.  He has taught himself two languages since he has
been lying there.  I shall try to be of use to
him.”

Secondly, this passage from Stevenson’s dedication of
Virginibus Puerisque to “My dear William Ernest
Henley”:

“These papers are like milestones on the wayside of my
life; and as I look back in memory, there is hardly a stage of
that distance but I see you present with advice, reproof, or
praise.  Meanwhile, many things have changed, you and I
among the rest; but I hope that our sympathy, founded on the love
of our art, and nourished by mutual assistance, shall survive
these little revolutions, undiminished, and, with God’s
help, unite us to the end.”

Thirdly, two scraps from letters from Stevenson to Henley, to
show that the latter was not always a depreciator of R. L.
Stevenson’s work:

“1. I’m glad to think I owe you the review that
pleased me best of all the reviews I ever had. . . . To live
reading such reviews and die eating ortolans—sich is my
aspiration.

“2. Dear lad,—If there was any more praise in what
you wrote, I think—(the editor who had pruned down Mr
Henley’s review of Stevenson’s Prince Otto)
has done us both a service; some of it stops my throat. . . .
Whether (considering our intimate relations) you would not do
better to refrain from reviewing me, I will leave to
yourself.”

And, lastly, this extract from the very last of
Stevenson’s letters to Henley, published in the two volumes
of Letters:

“It is impossible to let your new volume pass in
silence.  I have not received the same thrill of poetry
since G. M.’s Joy of Earth volume, and Love in a
Valley; and I do not know that even that was so intimate and
deep. . . . I thank you for the joy you have given me, and remain
your old friend and present huge admirer, R. L. S.”

It is difficult to decide on which side in this literary
friendship lies the true modesty and magnanimity?  I had
rather be the author of the last message of R. L. Stevenson to W.
E. Henley, than of the last words of W. E. Henley concerning R.
L. Stevenson.

CHAPTER XXV—MR CHRISTIE MURRAY’S IMPRESSIONS

Mr Christie Murray, writing as
“Merlin” in our handbook in the Referee at the
time, thus disposed of some of the points just dealt with by
us:

“Here is libel on a large scale, and I have
purposely refrained from approaching it until I could show my
readers something of the spirit in which the whole attack is
conceived.  ‘If he wanted a thing he went after it
with an entire contempt for consequences.  For these,
indeed, the Shorter Catechist was ever prepared to answer; so
that whether he did well or ill, he was safe to come out
unabashed and cheerful.’  Now if Mr Henley does not
mean that for the very express picture of a rascal without a
conscience he has been most strangely infelicitous in his choice
of terms, and he is one of those who make so strong a profession
of duty towards mere vocables that we are obliged to take him
au pied de la lettre.  A man who goes after whatever
he wants with an entire contempt of consequences is a scoundrel,
and the man who emerges from such an enterprise unabashed and
cheerful, whatever his conduct may have been, and justifies
himself on the principles of the Shorter Catechism, is a
hypocrite to boot.  This is not the report we have of Robert
Louis Stevenson from most of those who knew him.  It is a
most grave and dreadful accusation, and it is not minimised by Mr
Henley’s acknowledgment that Stevenson was a good
fellow.  We all know the air of false candour which lends a
disputant so much advantage in debate.  In Victor
Hugo’s tremendous indictment of Napoléon le Petit we
remember the telling allowance for fine horsemanship.  It
spreads an air of impartiality over the most mordant of
Hugo’s pages.  It is meant to do that.  An
insignificant praise is meant to show how a whole Niagara of
blame is poured on the victim of invective in all sincerity, and
even with a touch of reluctance.

“Mr Henley, despite his absurdities of
‘’Tis’ and ‘it were,’ is a fairly
competent literary craftsman, and he is quite gifted enough to
make a plain man’s plain meaning an evident thing if he
chose to do it.  But if for the friend for whom ‘first
and last he did share’ he can only show us the figure of
one ‘who was at bottom an excellent fellow,’ and who
had ‘an entire contempt’ for the consequences of his
own acts, he presents a picture which can only purposely be
obscured. . . .

“All I know of Robert Louis Stevenson I have learned
from his books, and from one unexpected impromptu letter which he
wrote to me years ago in friendly recognition of my own
work.  I add the testimonies of friends who may have been of
less actual service to him than Mr Henley, but who surely loved
him better and more lastingly.  These do not represent him
as the victim of an overweening personal vanity, nor as a person
reckless of the consequences of his own acts, nor as a Pecksniff
who consoled himself for moral failure out of the Shorter
Catechism.  The books and the friends amongst them show me
an erratic yet lovable personality, a man of devotion and
courage, a loyal, charming, and rather irresponsible person whose
very slight faults were counter-balanced many times over by very
solid virtues. . . .

“To put the thing flatly, it is not a heroism to cling
to mere existence.  The basest of us can do that.  But
it is a heroism to maintain an equable and unbroken cheerfulness
in the face of death.  For my own part, I never bowed at the
literary shrine Mr Henley and his friends were at so great pains
to rear.  I am not disposed to think more loftily than I
ever thought of their idol.  But the Man—the Man was
made of enduring valour and childlike charm, and these will keep
him alive when his detractors are dead and buried.”

As to the Christian name, it is notorious that he was
christened Robert Lewis—the Lewis being after his maternal
grandfather—Dr Lewis Balfour.  Some attempt has been
made to show that the Louis was adopted because so many cousins
and relatives had also been so christened; but the most likely
explanation I have ever heard was that his father changed the
name to Louis, that there might be no chance through it of any
notion of association with a very prominent noisy person of the
name of Lewis, in Edinburgh, towards whom Thomas Stevenson felt
dislike, if not positive animosity.  Anyhow, it is clear
from the entries in the register of pupils at the Edinburgh
Academy, in the two years when Stevenson was there, that in early
youth he was called Robert only; for in the school list for 1862
the name appears as Robert Stevenson, without the Lewis, while in
the 1883 list it is given as Lewis Robert Stevenson. 
Clearly if in earlier years Stevenson was, in his family and
elsewhere, called Robert, there could have then arisen no
risk of confusion with any of his relatives who bore the name of
Lewis; and all this goes to support the view which I have given
above.  Anyhow he ceased to be called Robert at home, and
ceased in 1863 to be Robert on the Edinburgh Academy list, and
became Lewis Robert.  Whether my view is right or not, he
was thenceforward called Louis in his family, and the name
uniformly spelt Louis.  What blame on Stevenson’s part
could be attached to this family determination it is hard to
see—people are absolutely free to spell their names as they
please, and the matter would not be worth a moment’s
attention, or the waste of one drop of ink, had not Mr Henley
chosen to be very nasty about the name, and in the Pall Mall
Magazine article persisted in printing it Lewis as though
that were worthy of him and of it.  That was not quite the
unkindest cut of all, but it was as unkind as it was
trumpery.  Mr Christie Murray neatly set off the trumpery
spite of this in the following passage:

“Stevenson, it appears, according to his
friend’s judgment, was ‘incessantly and passionately
interested in Stevenson,’ but most of us are incessantly
and passionately interested in ourselves.  ‘He could
not be in the same room with a mirror but he must invite its
confidences every time he passed it.’  I remember that
George Sala, who was certainly under no illusion as to his own
personal aspect, made public confession of an identical
foible.  Mr Henley may not have an equal affection for the
looking-glass, but he is a very poor and unimaginative reader who
does not see him gloating over the god-like proportions of the
shadow he sends sprawling over his own page.  I make free to
say that a more self-conscious person than Mr Henley does not
live.  ‘The best and most interesting part of
Stevenson’s life will never get written—even by
me,’ says Mr Henley.

“There is one curious little mark of animus, or one
equally curious affectation—I do not profess to know which,
and it is most probably a compound of the two—in Mr
Henley’s guardedly spiteful essay which asks for
notice.  The dead novelist signed his second name on his
title-pages and his private correspondence
‘Louis.’  Mr Henley spells it
‘Lewis.’  Is this intended to say that Stevenson
took an ornamenting liberty with his own baptismal
appellation?  If so, why not say the thing and have done
with it?  Or is it one of Mr Henley’s wilful
ridiculosities?  It seems to stand for some sort of meaning,
and to me, at least, it offers a jarring hint of small
spitefulness which might go for nothing if it were not so well
borne out by the general tone of Mr Henley’s article. 
It is a small matter enough, God knows, but it is precisely
because it is so very small that it irritates.”

CHAPTER XXVI—HERO-VILLAINS

In truth, it must indeed be here repeated that Stevenson for
the reason he himself gave about Deacon Brodie utterly
fails in that healthy hatred of “fools and
scoundrels” on which Carlyle somewhat incontinently
dilated.  Nor does he, as we have seen, draw the line
between hero and villain of the piece, as he ought to have done;
and, even for his own artistic purposes, has it too much all on
one side, to express it simply.  Art demands relief from any
one phase of human nature, more especially of that phase, and
even from what is morbid or exceptional.  Admitting that
such natures, say as Huish, the cockney, in the Ebb-Tide
on the one side, and Prince Otto on the other are possible, it is
yet absolutely demanded that they should not stand alone,
but have their due complement and balance present in the piece
also to deter and finally to tell on them in the action.  If
“a knave or villain,” as George Eliot aptly said, is
but a fool with a circumbendibus, this not only wants to be
shown, but to have that definite human counterpart and
corrective; and this not in any indirect and perfunctory way, but
in a direct and effective sense.  It is here that Stevenson
fails—fails absolutely in most of his work, save the very
latest—fails, as has been shown, in The Master of
Ballantrae, as it were almost of perverse and set purpose, in
lack of what one might call ethical decision which causes him to
waver or seem to waver and wobble in his judgment of his
characters or in his sympathy with them or for them.  Thus
he fails to give his readers the proper cue which was his duty
both as man and artist to have given.  The highest art and
the lowest are indeed here at one in demanding moral poise, if we
may call it so, that however crudely in the low, and however
artistically and refinedly in the high, vice should not only not
be set forth as absolutely triumphing, nor virtue as being
absolutely, outwardly, and inwardly defeated.  It is here
the same in the melodrama of the transpontine theatre as in the
tragedies of the Greek dramatists and Shakespeare. 
“The evening brings a’ ‘hame’” and
the end ought to show something to satisfy the innate craving
(for it is innate, thank Heaven! and low and high alike in
moments of elevated impression, acknowledge it and bow to
it) else there can scarce be true dénouement and
the sense of any moral rectitude or law remain as felt or
acknowledged in human nature or in the Universe itself.

Stevenson’s toleration and constant sermonising in the
essays—his desire to make us yield allowances all round is
so far, it may be, there in place; but it will not work out in
story or play, and declares the need for correction and
limitation the moment that he essays artistic
presentation—from the point of view of art he lacks at once
artistic clearness and decision, and from the point of view of
morality seems utterly loose and confusing.  His artistic
quality here rests wholly in his style—mere style, and he
is, alas! a castaway as regards discernment and reading of human
nature in its deepest demands and laws.  Herein lies the
false strain that has spoiled much of his earlier work, which
renders really superficial and confusing and undramatic his
professedly dramatic work—which never will and never can
commend the hearty suffrages of a mixed and various theatrical
audience in violating the very first rule of the theatre, and of
dramatic creation.

From another point of view this is my answer to Mr Pinero in
regard to the failure of Stevenson to command theatrical
success.  He confuses and so far misdirects the sympathies
in issues which strictly are at once moral and dramatic.

I am absolutely at one with Mr Baildon, though I reach my
results from somewhat different grounds from what he does, when
he says this about Beau Austin, and the reason of its
failure—complete failure—on the stage:

“I confess I should have liked immensely to
have seen [? to see] this piece on the boards; for only then
could one be quite sure whether it could be made convincing to an
audience and carry their sympathies in the way the author
intended.  Yet the fact that Beau Austin, in spite of
being ‘put on’ by so eminent an actor-manager as Mr
Beerbohm Tree, was no great success on the stage, is a fair proof
that the piece lacked some of the essentials, good or bad, of
dramatic success.  Now a drama, like a picture or a musical
composition, must have a certain unity of key and tone.  You
can, indeed, mingle comedy with tragedy as an interlude or relief
from the strain and stress of the serious interest of the
piece.  But you cannot reverse the process and mingle
tragedy with comedy.  Once touch the fine spun-silk of the
pretty fire-balloon of comedy with the tragic dagger, and it
falls to earth a shrivelled nothing.  And the reason that no
melodrama can be great art is just that it is a compromise
between tragedy and comedy, a mixture of tragedy with comedy and
not comedy with tragedy.  So in drama, the middle course,
proverbially the safest, is in reality the most dangerous. 
Now I maintain that in Beau Austin we have an element of
tragedy.  The betrayal of a beautiful, pure and noble-minded
woman is surely at once the basest act a man can be capable of,
and a more tragic event than death itself to the woman. 
Richardson, in Clarissa Harlowe, is well aware of this,
and is perfectly right in making his dénouement
tragic.  Stevenson, on the other hand, patches up the matter
into a rather tame comedy.  It is even much tamer than it
would have been in the case of Lovelace and Clarissa Harlowe; for
Lovelace is a strong character, a man who could have been put
through some crucial atonement, and come out purged and
ennobled.  But Beau Austin we feel is but a frip.  He
endures a few minutes of sharp humiliation, it is true, but to
the spectator this cannot but seem a very insufficient expiation,
not only of the wrong he had done one woman, but of the
indefinite number of wrongs he had done others.  He is at
once the villain and the hero of the piece, and in the narrow
limits of a brief comedy this transformation cannot be
convincingly effected.  Wrongly or rightly, a theatrical
audience, like the spectators of a trial, demand a definite
verdict and sentence, and no play can satisfy which does not
reasonably meet this demand.  And this arises not from any
merely Christian prudery or Puritanism, for it is as true for
Greek tragedy and other high forms of dramatic art.”

The transformation of villain into hero, if possible at all,
could only be convincingly effected in a piece of wide scope,
where there was room for working out the effect of some great
shock, upheaval of the nature, change due to deep and
unprecedented experiences—religious conversion, witnessing
of sudden death, providential rescue from great peril of death,
or circumstance of that kind; but to be effective and convincing
it needs to be marked and fully justified in some such
way; and no cleverness in the writer will absolve him from
deference to this great law in serious work for presentation on
the stage; if mere farces or little comedies may seem sometimes
to contravene it, yet this—even this—is only in
appearance.

True, it is not the dramatists part of himself to
condemn, or to approve, or praise: he has to present, and to
present various characters faithfully in their relation to each
other, and their effect upon each other.  But the moral
element cannot be expunged or set lightly aside because it is
closely involved in the very working out and presentation of
these relations, and the effect upon each other.  Character
is vital.  And character, if it tells in life, in influence
and affection, must be made to tell directly also in the
drama.  There is no escape from this—none; the
dramatist is lopsided if he tries to ignore it; he is a monster
if he is wholly blind to it—like the poet in In
Memoriam, “Without a conscience or an aim.” 
Mr Henley, in his notorious, all too confessional, and yet rather
affected article on Stevenson in the Pall Mall Magazine,
has a remark which I confess astonished me—a remark I could
never forget as coming from him.  He said that he “had
lived a very full and varied life, and had no interest in remarks
about morals.”  “Remarks about morals”
are, nevertheless, in essence, the pith of all the books to which
he referred, as those to which he turned in preference to the
Edinburgh Edition of R. L. Stevenson’s works. 
The moral element is implicit in the drama, and it is implicit
there because it is implicit in life itself, or so the great
common-sense conceives it and demands it.  What we might
call the asides proper of the drama, are “remarks about
morals,” nothing else—the chorus in the Greek tragedy
gathered up “remarks about morals” as near as might
be to the “remarks about morals” in the streets of
that day, only shaped to a certain artistic consistency. 
Shakespeare is rich in “remarks about morals,” often
coming near, indeed, to personal utterance, and this not only
when Polonius addresses his son before his going forth on his
travels.  Mr Henley here only too plainly confessed, indeed,
to lack of that conviction and insight which, had he but
possessed them, might have done a little to relieve Beau
Austin and the other plays in which he collaborated with R.
L. Stevenson, from their besetting and fatal weakness.  The
two youths, alas! thought they could be grandly original by
despising, or worse, contemning “remarks about
morals” in the loftier as in the lower sense.  To
“live a full and varied life,” if the experience
derived from it is to have expression in the drama, is only to
have the richer resource in “remarks about
morals.”  If this is perverted under any
self-conscious notion of doing something spick-and-span new in
the way of character and plot, alien to all the old conceptions,
then we know our writers set themselves boldly at loggerheads
with certain old-fashioned and yet older new-fashioned laws,
which forbid the violation of certain common demands of the
ordinary nature and common-sense; and for the lack of this, as
said already, no cleverness, no resource, no style or graft, will
any way make up.  So long as this is tried, with whatever
concentration of mind and purpose, failure is yet inevitable, and
the more inevitable the more concentration and less of humorous
by-play, because genius itself, if it despises the general moral
sentiment and instinct for moral proportion—an ethnic
reward and punishment, so to say—is all astray, working
outside the line; and this, if Mr Pinero will kindly excuse me,
is the secret of the failure of these plays, and not want of
concentration, etc., in the sense he meant, or as he has put
it.

Stevenson rather affected what he called “tail-foremost
morality,” a kind of inversion in the field of morals, as
De Quincey mixed it up with tail-foremost humour in Murder as
a Fine Art, etc., etc., but for all such perversions as these
the stage is a grand test and corrector, and such perversions,
and not “remarks about morals,” are most strictly
prohibited there.  Perverted subtleties of the sort
Stevenson in earlier times especially much affected are not only
amiss but ruinous on the stage; and what genius itself would
maybe sanction, common-sense must reject and rigidly cut
away.  Final success and triumph come largely by this
kind of condensation and concentration, and the stern and severe
lopping off of the indulgence of the egotistical genius,
which is human discipline, and the best exponent of the doctrine
of unity also.  This is the straight and the narrow way
along which genius, if it walk but faithfully, sows as it goes in
the dramatic pathway all the flowers of human passion, hope,
love, terror, and triumph.

I find it advisable, if not needful, here to reinforce my own
impressions, at some points, by another quotation from Mr
Baildon, if he will allow me, in which Stevenson’s
dependence in certain respects on the dream-faculty is
emphasised, and to it is traced a certain tendency to a moral
callousness or indifference which is one of the things in which
the waking Stevenson transparently suffered now and then
invasions from the dream-Stevenson—the result, a kind of
spot, as we may call it, on the eye of the moral sense; it is a
small spot; but we know how a very small object held close before
the eye will wholly shut out the most lovely natural prospects,
interposing distressful phantasmagoria, due to the strained and,
for the time, morbid condition of the organ itself.  So, it
must be confessed, it is to a great extent here.

But listen to Mr Baildon:

“In A Chapter on Dreams, Stevenson confesses his
indebtedness to this still mysterious agency.  From a child
he had been a great and vivid dreamer, his dreams often taking
such frightful shape that he used to awake ‘clinging in
terror to the bedpost.’  Later in life his dreams
continued to be frequent and vivid, but less terrifying in
character and more continuous and systematic.  ‘The
Brownies,’ as he picturesquely names that
‘sub-conscious imagination,’ as the scientist would
call it, that works with such surprising freedom and ingenuity in
our dreams, became, as it were, collaborateurs in his work
of authorship.  He declares that they invented plots and
even elaborated whole novels, and that, not in a single night or
single dream, but continuously, and from one night to another,
like a story in serial parts.  Long before this essay was
written or published, I had been struck by this phantasmal
dream-like quality in some of Stevenson’s works, which I
was puzzled to account for, until I read this extraordinary
explanation, for explanation it undoubtedly affords. 
Anything imagined in a dream would have a tendency, when retold,
to retain something of its dream-like character, and I have on
doubt one could trace in many instances and distinguish the
dreaming and the waking Stevenson, though in others they may be
blended beyond recognition.  The trouble with the Brownies
or the dream-Stevenson was his or their want of moral
sense, so that they sometimes presented the waking author
with plots which he could not make use of.  Of this
Stevenson gives an instance in which a complete story of marked
ingenuity is vetoed through the moral impossibility of its
presentment by a writer so scrupulous (and in some directions he
is extremely scrupulous) as Stevenson was.  But Stevenson
admits that his most famous story, The Strange Case of Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde, was not only suggested by a dream, but
that some of the most important and most criticised points, such
as the matter of the powder, were taken direct from the
dream.  It had been extremely instructive and interesting
had he gone more into detail and mentioned some of the other
stories into which the dream-element entered largely and pointed
out its influence, and would have given us a better clue than we
have or now ever can have.

“Even in The Suicide Club and the
Rajah’s Diamond, I seem to feel strongly the
presence of the dream-Stevenson. . . . At certain points one
feels conscious of a certain moral callousness, such as
marks the dream state, as in the murder of Colonel
Geraldine’s brother, the horror of which never seems
to come fully home to us.  But let no one suppose these
stories are lacking in vividness and in strangely realistic
detail; for this is of the very nature of dreaming at its height.
. . . While the dramatis personæ play their parts
with the utmost spirit while the story proceeds, they do not, as
the past creations do, seem to survive this first contact and
live in our minds.  This is particularly true of the
women.  They are well drawn, and play the assigned parts
well enough, but they do not, as a rule, make a place for
themselves either in our hearts or memories.  If there is an
exception it is Elvira, in Providence and the Guitar; but
we remember her chiefly by the one picture of her falling asleep,
after the misadventures of the night, at the supper-table, with
her head on her husband’s shoulder, and her hand locked in
his with instinctive, almost unconscious tenderness.”

CHAPTER XXVII—MR G. MOORE, MR MARRIOTT WATSON AND
OTHERS

From our point of view it will therefore be seen that we could
not have read Mr George Moore’s wonderfully uncritical and
misdirected diatribe against Stevenson in The Daily
Chronicle of 24th April 1897, without amusement, if not
without laughter—indeed, we confess we may here quote
Shakespeare’s words, we “laughed so consumedly”
that, unless for Mr Moore’s high position and his assured
self-confidence, we should not trust ourselves to refer to it,
not to speak of writing about it.  It was a review of The
Secret Rose by W. B. Yeats, but it passed after one single
touch to belittling abuse of Stevenson—an abuse that was
justified the more, in Mr Moore’s idea, because Stevenson
was dead.  Had he been alive he might have had something to
say to it, in the way, at least, of fable and moral.  And
when towards the close Mr Moore again quotes from Mr Yeats, it is
still “harping on my daughter” to undo Stevenson, as
though a rat was behind the arras, as in Hamlet. 
“Stevenson,” says he, “is the leader of these
countless writers who perceive nothing but the visible
world,” and these are antagonistic to the great literature,
of which Mr Yeats’s Secret Rose is a survival or a
renaissance, a literature whose watchword should be Mr
Yeats’s significant phrase, “When one looks into the
darkness there is always something there.”  No doubt
Mr Yeats’s product all along the line ranks with the great
literature—unlike Homer, according to Mr Moore, he never
nods, though in the light of great literature, poor Stevenson is
always at his noddings, and more than that, in the words of
Leland’s Hans Breitmann, he has “nodings
on.”  He is poor, naked, miserable—a mere
pretender—and has no share in the makings of great
literature.  Mr Moore has stripped him to the skin, and
leaves him to the mercy of rain and storm, like Lear, though Lear
had a solid ground to go on in self-aid, which Stevenson had not;
he had daughters, and one of them was Cordelia, after all. 
This comes of painting all boldly in black and white: Mr Yeats is
white, R. L. Stevenson is black, and I am sure neither one nor
other, because simply of their self-devotion to their art, could
have subscribed heartily to Mr Moore’s black art and white
art theory.  Mr Yeats is hardly the truest modern Celtic
artist I take him for, if he can fully subscribe to all this.

Mr Marriott Watson has a little unadvisedly, in my view, too
like ambition, fallen on ’tother side, and celebrated
Stevenson as the master of the horrifying. [11]  He even finds the
Ebb-Tide, and Huish, the cockney, in it richly
illustrative and grand.  “There never was a more
magnificent cad in literature, and never a more foul-hearted
little ruffian.  His picture glitters (!) with life, and
when he curls up on the island beach with the bullet in his body,
amid the flames of the vitriol he had intended for another, the
reader’s shudder conveys something also, even (!) of
regret.”

And well it may!  Individual taste and opinion are but
individual taste and opinion, but the Ebb-Tide and the
cockney I should be inclined to cite as a specimen of
Stevenson’s all too facile make-believe, in which there is
too definite a machinery set agoing for horrors for the horrors
to be quite genuine.  The process is often too forced with
Stevenson, and the incidents too much of the manufactured order,
for the triumph of that simplicity which is of inspiration and
unassailable.  Here Stevenson, alas! all too often,
pace Mr Marriott Watson, treads on the skirts of E. A.
Poe, and that in his least composed and elevated artistic
moments.  And though, it is true, that “genius will
not follow rules laid down by desultory critics,” yet when
it is averred that “this piece of work fulfils
Aristotle’s definition of true tragedy, in accomplishing
upon the reader a certain purification of the emotions by means
of terror and pity,” expectations will be raised in many of
the new generation, doomed in the cases of the more sensitive and
discerning, at all events, not to be gratified.  There is a
distinction, very bold and very essential, between melodrama,
however carefully worked and staged, and that tragedy to which
Aristotle was there referring.  Stevenson’s
“horrifying,” to my mind, too often touches the
trying borders of melodrama, and nowhere more so than in the very
forced and unequal Ebb-Tide, which, with its rather
doubtful moral and forced incident when it is good, seems merely
to borrow from what had gone before, if not a very little even
from some of what came after.  No service is done to an
author like Stevenson by fatefully praising him for precisely the
wrong thing.

“Romance attracted Stevenson, at least
during the earlier part of his life, as a lodestone attracts the
magnet.  To romance he brought the highest gifts, and he has
left us not only essays of delicate humour” (should this
not be “essays full of” or
“characterised by”?) “and sensitive
imagination, but stories also which thrill with the realities of
life, which are faithful pictures of the times and tempers he
dealt with, and which, I firmly believe, will live so”
(should it not be “as”?) “long as our noble
English language.”

Mr Marriott Watson sees very clearly in some things; but
occasionally he misses the point.  The problem is here
raised how two honest, far-seeing critics could see so very
differently on so simple a subject.

Mr Baildon says about the Ebb-Tide:

“I can compare his next book, the
Ebb-Tide (in collaboration with Osbourne) to little better
than a mud-bath, for we find ourselves, as it were, unrelieved by
dredging among the scum and dregs of humanity, the ‘white
trash’ of the Pacific.  Here we have Stevenson’s
masterly but utterly revolting incarnation of the lowest, vilest,
vulgarest villainy in the cockney, Huish.  Stevenson’s
other villains shock us by their cruel and wicked conduct; but
there is a kind of fallen satanic glory about them, some shining
threads of possible virtue.  They might have been good, even
great in goodness, but for the malady of not wanting.  But
Huish is a creature hatched in slime, his soul has no true
humanity: it is squat and toad-like, and can only spit venom. . .
. He himself felt a sort of revulsive after-sickness for the
story, and calls it in one passage of his Vailima Letters
‘the ever-to-be-execrated Ebb-Tide’ (pp. 
178 and 184). . . . He repented of it like a debauch, and, as
with some men after a debauch, felt cleared and strengthened
instead of wrecked.  So, after what in one sense was his
lowest plunge, Stevenson rose to the greatest height.  That
is the tribute to his virtue and strength indeed, but it does not
change the character of the Ebb-Tide as ‘the
ever-to-be-execrated.’”

Mr Baildon truly says (p. 49):

“The curious point is that Stevenson’s
own great fault, that tendency to what has been called the
‘Twopence-coloured’ style, is always at its worst in
books over which he collaborated.”

“Verax,” in one of his “Occasional
Papers” in the Daily News on “The Average
Reader” has this passage:

“We should not object to a writer who could
repeat Barrie in A Window in Thrums, nor to one who would
paint a scene as Louis Stevenson paints Attwater alone on his
South Sea island, the approach of the pirates to the harbour, and
their subsequent reception and fate.  All these are surely
specimens of brilliant writing, and they are brilliant because,
in the first place, they give truth.  The events described
must, in the supposed circumstances, and with the given
characters, have happened in the way stated.  Only in none
of the specimens have we a mere photograph of the outside of what
took place.  We have great pictures by genius of
the—to the prosaic eye—invisible realities, as well
as of the outward form of the actions.  We behold and are
made to feel the solemnity, the wildness, the pathos, the
earnestness, the agony, the pity, the moral squalor, the
grotesque fun, the delicate and minute beauty, the natural
loveliness and loneliness, the quiet desperate bravery, or
whatever else any of these wonderful pictures disclose to our
view.  Had we been lookers-on, we, the average readers,
could not have seen these qualities for ourselves.  But they
are there, and genius enables us to see them.  Genius makes
truth shine.

“Is it not, therefore, probable that the brilliancy
which we average readers do not want, and only laugh at when we
get it, is something altogether different?  I think I know
what it is.  It is an attempt to describe with words without
thoughts, an effort to make readers see something the writer has
never seen himself in his mind’s eye.  He has no
revelation, no vision, nothing to disclose, and to produce an
impression uses words, words, words, makes daub, daub, daub,
without any definite purpose, and certainly without any real, or
artistic, or definite effect.  To describe, one must first
of all see, and if we see anything the description of it will, as
far as it is in us, come as effortless and natural as the leaves
on trees, or as ‘the tender greening of April
meadows.’  I, therefore, more than suspect that the
brilliancy which the average reader laughs at is not
brilliancy.  A pot of flaming red paint thrown at a canvas
does not make a picture.”

Now there is vision for outward picture or separate incident,
which may exist quite apart from what may be called moral,
spiritual, or even loftily imaginative conception, at once
commanding unity and commanding it.  There can be no doubt
of Stevenson’s power in the former line—the earliest
as the latest of his works are witnesses to it.  The
Master of Ballantrae abounds in picture and incident and
dramatic situations and touches; but it lacks true unity, and the
reason simply is given by Stevenson himself—that the
“ending shames, perhaps degrades, the beginning,” as
it is in the Ebb-Tide, with the cockney Huish,
“execrable.”  “We have great pictures by
genius of the—to the prosaic eye—invisible realities,
as well as the outward form of the action.”  True, but
the “invisible realities” form that from which true
unity is derived, else their partial presence but makes the whole
the more incomplete and lop-sided, if not indeed, top-heavy, from
light weight beneath; and it is in the unity derived from this
higher pervading, yet not too assertive “invisible
reality,” that Stevenson most often fails, and is, in his
own words, “execrable”; the ending shaming, if not
degrading, the beginning—“and without the true sense
of pleasurableness; and therefore really imperfect in
essence.”  Ah, it is to be feared that Stevenson,
viewing it in retrospect, was a far truer critic of his own work,
than many or most of his all too effusive and admiring
critics—from Lord Rosebery to Mr Marriott Watson.

Amid the too extreme deliverances of detractors and especially
of erewhile friends, become detractors or panegyrists, who
disturb judgment by overzeal, which is often but half-blindness,
it is pleasant to come on one who bears the balances in his hand,
and will report faithfully as he has seen and felt, neither more
nor less than what he holds is true.  Mr Andrew Lang wrote
an article in the Morning Post of 16th December 1901,
under the title “Literary Quarrels,” in which, as I
think, he fulfilled his part in midst of the talk about Mr
Henley’s regrettable attack on Stevenson.

“Without defending the character of a friend
whom even now I almost daily miss, as that character was
displayed in circumstances unknown to me, I think that I ought to
speak of him as I found him.  Perhaps our sympathy was
mainly intellectual.  Constantly do those who knew him
desire to turn to him, to communicate with him, to share with him
the pleasure of some idea, some little discovery about men or
things in which he would have taken pleasure, increasing our own
by the gaiety of his enjoyment, the brilliance of his
appreciation.  We may say, as Scott said at the grave of
John Ballantyne, that he has taken with him half the sunlight out
of our lives.  That he was sympathetic and interested in the
work of others (which I understand has been denied) I have reason
to know.  His work and mine lay far apart: mine, I think, we
never discussed, I did not expect it to interest him.  But
in a fragmentary manuscript of his after his death I found the
unlooked for and touching evidence of his kindness.  Again,
he once wrote to me from Samoa about the work of a friend of mine
whom he had never met.  His remarks were ideally judicious,
a model of serviceable criticism.  I found him chivalrous as
an honest boy; brave, with an indomitable gaiety of courage; on
the point of honour, a Sydney or a Bayard (so he seemed to me);
that he was open-handed I have reason to believe; he took life
‘with a frolic welcome.’  That he was
self-conscious, and saw himself as it were, from without; that he
was fond of attitude (like his own brave admirals) he himself
knew well, and I doubt not that he would laugh at himself and his
habit of ‘playing at’ things after the fashion of
childhood.  Genius is the survival into maturity of the
inspiration of childhood, and Stevenson is not the only genius
who has retained from childhood something more than its
inspiration.  Other examples readily occur to the
memory—in one way Byron, in another Tennyson.  None of
us is perfect: I do not want to erect an immaculate clay-cold
image of a man, in marble or in sugar-candy.  But I will say
that I do not remember ever to have heard Mr Stevenson utter a
word against any mortal, friend or foe.  Even in a case
where he had, or believed himself to have, received some wrong,
his comment was merely humorous.  Especially when very
young, his dislike of respectability and of the bourgeois
(a literary tradition) led him to show a kind of contempt for
virtues which, though certainly respectable, are no less
certainly virtuous.  He was then more or less seduced by the
Bohemian legend, but he was intolerant of the fudge about the
rights and privileges of genius.  A man’s first
business, he thought, was ‘keep his end up’ by his
work.  If, what he reckoned his inspired work would not
serve, then by something else.  Of many virtues he was an
ensample and an inspiring force.  One foible I admit: the
tendency to inopportune benevolence.  Mr Graham Balfour says
that if he fell into ill terms with a man he would try to do him
good by stealth.  Though he had seen much of the world and
of men, this practice showed an invincible ignorance of
mankind.  It is improbable, on the doctrine of chances, that
he was always in the wrong; and it is probable, as he was human,
that he always thought himself in the right.  But as the
other party to the misunderstanding, being also human, would
necessarily think himself in the right, such secret benefits
would be, as Sophocles says, ‘the gifts of foeman and
unprofitable.’  The secret would leak out, the
benefits would be rejected, the misunderstanding would be
embittered.  This reminds me of an anecdote which is not
given in Mr Graham Balfour’s biography.  As a little
delicate, lonely boy in Edinburgh, Mr Stevenson read a book
called Ministering Children.  I have a faint
recollection of this work concerning a small Lord and Lady
Bountiful.  Children, we know, like to ‘play at’
the events and characters they have read about, and the boy
wanted to play at being a ministering child.  He
‘scanned his whole horizon’ for somebody to play
with, and thought he had found his playmate.  From the
window he observed street boys (in Scots ‘keelies’)
enjoying themselves.  But one child was out of the sports, a
little lame fellow, the son of a baker.  Here was a
chance!  After some misgivings Louis hardened his heart, put
on his cap, walked out—a refined little
figure—approached the object of his sympathy, and said,
‘Will you let me play with you?’  ‘Go to
hell!’ said the democratic offspring of the baker. 
This lesson against doing good by stealth to persons of unknown
or hostile disposition was, it seems, thrown away.  Such
endeavours are apt to be misconstrued.”

CHAPTER XXVIII—UNEXPECTED COMBINATIONS

The complete artist should not be mystical-moralist any more
than the man who “perceives only the visible
world”—he should not engage himself with problems in
the direct sense any more than he should blind himself to their
effect upon others, whom he should study, and under certain
conditions represent, though he should not commit himself to any
form of zealot faith, yet should he not be, as Lord Tennyson puts
it in the Palace of Art:

“As God holding no form of creed,
But contemplating all,”

because his power lies in the broadness of his humanity
touched to fine issues whenever there is the seal at once of
truth, reality, and passion, and the tragedy bred of their
contact and conflict.

All these things are to him real and clamant in the measure
that they aid appeal to heart and emotion—in the measure
that they may, in his hands, be made to tell for sympathy and
general effect.  He creates an atmosphere in which each and
all may be seen the more effectively, but never seen alone or
separate, but only in strict relation to each other that they may
heighten the sense of some supreme controlling power in the
destinies of men, which with the ancients was figured as Fate,
and for which the moderns have hardly yet found an enduring and
exhaustive name.  Character revealed in reference to that,
is the ideal and the aim of all high creative art. 
Stevenson’s narrowness, allied to a quaint and occasionally
just a wee pedantic finickiness, as we may call it—an
over-elaborate, almost tricky play with mere words and phrases,
was in so far alien to the very highest—he was too often
like a man magnetised and moving at the dictates of some outside
influence rather than according to his own freewill and as he
would.

Action in creative literary art is a sine quâ
non; keeping all the characters and parts in unison, that a
true dénouement, determined by their own tendencies
and temperaments, may appear; dialogue and all asides, if we may
call them so, being supererogatory and weak really unless they
aid this and are constantly contributory to it.  Egotistical
predeterminations, however artfully intruded, are, alien to the
full result, the unity which is finally craved: Stevenson fails,
when he does fail, distinctly from excess of egotistic regards;
he is, as Henley has said, in the French sense, too
personnel, and cannot escape from it.  And though
these personal regards are exceedingly interesting and indeed
fascinating from the point of view of autobiographical study,
they are, and cannot but be, a drawback on fiction or the
disinterested revelation of life and reality.  Instead,
therefore, of “the visible world,” as the only thing
seen, Stevenson’s defect is, that between it and him lies a
cloud strictly self-projected, like breath on a mirror, which
dims the lines of reality and confuses the character marks, in
fact melting them into each other; and in his sympathetic
regards, causing them all to become too much alike.  Scott
had more of the power of healthy self-withdrawal, creating more
of a free atmosphere, in which his characters could freely
move—though in this, it must be confessed, he failed far
more with women than with men.  The very defects poor
Carlyle found in Scott, and for which he dealt so severely with
him, as sounding no depth, are really the basis of his strength,
precisely as the absence of them were the defects of Goethe, who
invariably ran his characters finally into the mere moods of his
own mind and the mould of his errant philosophy, so that they
became merely erratic symbols without hold in the common
sympathy.  Whether Walverwandschaften, Wilhelm
Meister, or Faust, it is still the same—the
company before all is done are translated into misty shapes that
he actually needs to label for our identification and for his
own.  Even Mr G. H. Lewes saw this and could not help
declaring his own lack of interest in the latter parts of
Goethe’s greatest efforts.  Stevenson, too, tends to
run his characters into symbols—his moralist-fabulist
determinations are too much for him—he would translate them
into a kind of chessmen, moved or moving on a board.  The
essence of romance strictly is, that as the characters will not
submit themselves to the check of reality, the romancer may
consciously, if it suits him, touch them at any point with the
magic wand of symbol, and if he finds a consistency in mere
fanciful invention it is enough.  Tieck’s
Phantasus and George MacDonald’s Phantastes
are ready instances illustrative of this.  But it is very
different with the story of real life, where there is a definite
check in the common-sense and knowledge of the reader, and where
the highest victory always lies in drawing from the reader the
admission—“that is life—life exactly as I have
seen and known it.  Though I could never have put it so,
still it only realises my own conception and observation. 
That is something lovingly remembered and re-presented, and this
master makes me lovingly remember too, though ’twas his to
represent and reproduce with such vigor, vividness and truth that
he carried me with him, exactly as though I had been looking on
real men and women playing their part or their game in the great
world.”

Mr Zangwill, in his own style, wrote:

“He seeks to combine the novel of character
with the novel of adventure; to develop character through
romantic action, and to bring out your hero at the end of the
episode, not the fixed character he was at the beginning, as is
the way of adventure books, but a modified creature. . . . It is
his essays and his personality, rather than his novels, that will
count with posterity.  On the whole, a great provincial
writer.  Whether he has that inherent grip which makes a
man’s provinciality the very source of his strength . . .
only the centuries can show.

The romanticist to the end pursued Stevenson—he could
not, wholly or at once, shake off the bonds in which he had bound
himself to his first love, and it was the romanticist crossed by
the casuist, and the mystic—Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Markheim
and Will of the Mill, insisted on his acknowledging them in his
work up to the end.  The modified creature at the end
of Mr Zangwill was modified too directly by the egotistic element
as well as through the romantic action, and this point missed the
great defect was missed, and Mr Zangwill spoke only in
generals.

M. Schwob, after having related how unreal a real
sheep’s heart looked when introduced on the end of
Giovanni’s dagger in a French performance of John
Ford’s Annabella and Giovanni, and how at the next
performance the audience was duly thrilled when Annabella’s
bleeding heart, made of a bit of red flannel, was borne upon the
stage, goes on to say significantly:

“Il me semble que les personnages de
Stevenson ont justement cette espèce de réalisme
irréal.  La large figure luisante de Long John, la
couleur blême du crâne de Thevenin Pensete
s’attachent à la mémoire de nos yeux en
vertue de leur irréalité même.  Ce sont
des fantômes de la vérité, hallucinants comme
de vrais fantômes.  Notez en passant que les traits de
John Silver hallucinent Jim Hawkins, et que François
Villon est hanté par l’aspect de Thevenin
Pensete.”

Perhaps the most notable fact arising here, and one that well
deserves celebration, is this, that Stevenson’s development
towards a broader and more natural creation was coincident with a
definite return on the religious views which had so powerfully
prevailed with his father—a circumstance which it is to be
feared did not, any more than some other changes in him, at all
commend itself to Mr Henley, though he had deliberately dubbed
him even in the times of nursing nigh to the Old Bristo Port in
Edinburgh—something of “Shorter Catechist.”
Anyway Miss Simpson deliberately wrote:

“Mr Henley takes exception to
Stevenson’s later phase in life—what he calls his
‘Shorter Catechism phase.’  It should be
remembered that Mr Henley is not a Scotsman, and in some things
has little sympathy with Scotch characteristics.  Stevenson,
in his Samoan days, harked back to the teaching of his youth; the
tenets of the Shorter Catechism, which his mother and nurse had
dinned into his head, were not forgotten.  Mr Henley knew
him best, as Stevenson says in the preface to Virginibus
Puerisque dedicated to Henley, ‘when he lived his life
at twenty-five.’  In these days he had [in some
degree] forgotten about the Shorter Catechism, but the
‘solemn pause’ between Saturday and Monday came back
in full force to R. L. Stevenson in Samoa.”

Now to me that is a most suggestive and significant
fact.  It will be the business of future critics to show in
how far such falling back would of necessity modify what Mr
Baildon has set down as his corner-stone of morality, and how far
it was bound to modify the atmosphere—the purely egotistic,
hedonistic, and artistic atmosphere, in which, in his earlier
life as a novelist, at all events, he had been, on the whole, for
long whiles content to work.

CHAPTER XXIX—LOVE OF VAGABONDS

What is very remarkable in Stevenson is that a man who was so
much the dreamer of dreams—the mystic moralist, the
constant questioner and speculator on human destiny and human
perversity, and the riddles that arise on the search for the
threads of motive and incentives to human action—moreover,
a man, who constantly suffered from one of the most trying and
weakening forms of ill-health—should have been so
full-blooded, as it were, so keen for contact with all forms of
human life and character, what is called the rougher and coarser
being by no means excluded.  Not only this: he was himself a
rover—seeking daily adventure and contact with men and
women of alien habit and taste and liking.  His patience is
supported by his humour.  He was a bit of a vagabond in the
good sense of the word, and always going round in search of
“honest men,” like Diogenes, and with no tub to
retire into or the desire for it.  He thus on this side
touches the Chaucers and their kindred, as well as the Spensers
and Dantes and their often illusive
confrères.  His voyage as a steerage passenger
across the Atlantic is only one out of a whole chapter of such
episodes, and is more significant and characteristic even than
the Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes or the Inland
Voyage.  These might be ranked with the
“Sentimental Journeys” that have sometimes been the
fashion—that was truly of a prosaic and risky order. 
The appeal thus made to an element deep in the English nature
will do much to keep his memory green in the hearts that could
not rise to appreciation of his style and literary gifts at
all.  He loves the roadways and the by-ways, and those to be
met with there—like him in this, though unlike him in most
else.  The love of the roadsides and the greenwood—and
the queer miscellany of life there unfolded and ever
changing—a kind of gipsy-like longing for the tent and
familiar contact with nature and rude human-nature in the open
dates from beyond Chaucer, and remains and will have
gratification—the longing for novelty and all the
accidents, as it were, of pilgrimage and rude social
travel.  You see it bubble up, like a true and new
nature-spring, through all the surface coatings of culture and
artificiality, in Stevenson.  He anew, without pretence,
enlivens it—makes it first a part of himself, and then a
part of literature once more.  Listen to him, as he
sincerely sings this passion for the pilgrimage—or the
modern phase of it—innocent vagabond roving:

“Give to me the life I love,
   Let the lave go by me;
Give the jolly heaven above,
   And the by-way nigh me:
Bed in the bush, with stars to see;
   Bread I dip in the river—
Here’s the life for a man like me,
   Here’s the life for ever. . . .

“Let the blow fall soon or late;
   Let what will be o’er me;
Give the face of earth around
   And the road before me.
Health I ask not, hope nor love,
   Nor a friend to know me:
All I ask the heaven above,
   And the road below me.”

True; this is put in the mouth of another, but Stevenson could
not have so voiced it, had he not been the born rover that he
was, with longing for the roadside, the high hills, and forests
and newcomers and varied miscellaneous company.  Here he
does more directly speak in his own person and quite to the same
effect:

“I will make you brooches and toys for your
delight
Of bird song at morning, and star shine at night,
I will make a palace fit for you and me,
Of green days in forests and blue days at sea.

“I will make my kitchen, and you shall keep your
room,
Where white flows the river, and bright blows the broom,
And you shall wash your linen and keep your body white,
In rainfall at morning and dew-fall at night.

“And this shall be for music when no one else is
near,
The fine song for singing, the rare song to hear!
That only I remember, that only you admire,
Of the broad road that stretches, and the roadside
fire.”

Here Stevenson, though original in his vein and way, but
follows a great and gracious company in which Fielding and Sterne
and so many others stand as pleasant proctors.  Scott and
Dickens have each in their way essayed it, and made much of it
beyond what mere sentiment would have reached. 
Pickwick itself—and we must always regard Dickens as
having himself gone already over every bit of road, described
every nook and corner, and tried every resource—is a
vagrant fellow, in a group of erratic and most quaint wanderers
or pilgrims.  This is but a return phase of it; Vincent
Crummles and Mrs Crummles and the “Infant
Phenomenon,” yet another.  The whole interest lies in
the roadways, and the little inns, and the odd and unexpected
rencontres with oddly-assorted fellows there experienced:
glimpses of grim or grimy, or forbidding, or happy, smiling
smirking vagrants, and out-at-elbows fellow-passengers and
guests, with jests and quips and cranks, and hanky-panky
even.  On high roads and in inns, and alehouses, with
travelling players, rogues and tramps, Dickens was quite at home;
and what is yet more, he made us all quite at home with them: and
he did it as Chaucer did it by thorough good spirits and
“hail-fellow-well-met.”  And, with all his
faults, he has this merit as well as some others, that he went
willingly on pilgrimage always, and took others, promoting always
love of comrades, fun, and humorous by-play.  The latest
great romancer, too, took his side: like Dickens, he was here
full brother of Dan Chaucer, and followed him.  How
characteristic it is when he tells Mr Trigg that he preferred
Samoa to Honolulu because it was more savage, and therefore
yielded more fun.

CHAPTER XXX—LORD ROSEBERY’S CASE

Immediately on reading Lord Rosebery’s address as
Chairman of the meeting in Edinburgh to promote the erection of a
monument to R. L. Stevenson, I wrote to him politely asking him
whether, since he quoted a passage from a somewhat early essay by
Stevenson naming the authors who had chiefly influenced him in
point of style, his Lordship should not, merely in justice and
for the sake of balance, have referred to Thoreau.  I also
remarked that Stevenson’s later style sometimes showed too
much self-conscious conflict of his various models in his mind
while he was in the act of writing, and that this now and then
imparted too much an air of artifice to his later compositions,
and that those who knew most would be most troubled by it. 
Of that letter, I much regret now that I did not keep any copy;
but I think I did incidentally refer to the friendship with which
Stevenson had for so many years honoured me.  This is a copy
of the letter received in reply:

“38 Berkeley Square, W.,
17th December 1896.

“Dear Sir,—I am much
obliged for your letter, and can only state that the name of
Thoreau was not mentioned by Stevenson himself, and therefore I
could not cite it in my quotation.

“With regard to the style of Stevenson’s later
works, I am inclined to agree with you.-Believe me, yours very
faithfully,

Rosebery.

“Dr Alexander H.
Japp.”

This I at once replied to as follows:

“National Liberal Club,
Whitehall Place, S.W.,
19th December 1896.

“My Lord,—It is true R.
L. Stevenson did not refer to Thoreau in the passage to which you
allude, for the good reason that he could not, since he did not
know Thoreau till after it was written; but if you will oblige me
and be so good as to turn to p. xix. of Preface, By Way of
Criticism, to Familiar Studies of Men and Books you
will read:

“‘Upon me this pure, narrow, sunnily-ascetic
Thoreau had exercised a wondrous charm.  I have scarce
written ten sentences since I was introduced to him, but
his influence might be somewhere detected by a close
observer.’

“It is very detectable in many passages of
nature-description and of reflection.  I write, my Lord,
merely that, in case opportunity should arise, you might notice
this fact.  I am sure R. L. Stevenson would have liked it
recognised.—I remain, my Lord, always yours faithfully,
etc.,

Alexander H. Japp.”

In reply to this Lord Rosebery sent me only the most formal
acknowledgment, not in the least encouraging me in any way to
further aid him in the matter with regard to suggestions of any
kind; so that I was helpless to press on his lordship the need
for some corrections on other points which I would most willingly
have tendered to him had he shown himself inclined or ready to
receive them.

I might also have referred Lord Rosebery to the article in
The British Weekly (1887), “Books that have
Influenced Me,” where, after having spoken of Shakespeare,
the Vicomte de Bragelonne, Bunyan, Montaigne, Goethe,
Martial, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, and
Wordsworth, he proceeds:

“I suppose, when I am done, I shall find
that I have forgotten much that is influential, as I see already
I have forgotten Thoreau.”

I need but to add to what has been said already that, had Lord
Rosebery written and told me the result of his references and
encouraged me to such an exercise, I should by-and-by have been
very pleased to point out to him that he blundered, proving
himself no master in Burns’ literature, precisely as Mr
Henley blundered about Burns’ ancestry, when he gives
confirmation to the idea that Burns came of a race of peasants on
both sides, and was himself nothing but a peasant.

When the opportunity came to correct such blunders,
corrections which I had even implored him to make, Lord Rosebery
(who by several London papers had been spoken of as
“knowing more than all the experts about all his
themes”), that is, when his volume was being prepared for
press, did not act on my good advice given him
“free, gratis, for nothing”; no;
he contented himself with simply slicing out columns from the
Times, or allowing another man to do so for him, and
reprinting them literatim et verbatim, all imperfect and
misleading, as they stood.  Scripta manet alas! only
too truly exemplified to his disadvantage.  But with that
note of mine in his hand, protesting against an ominous and fatal
omission as regards the confessed influences that had operated on
Stevenson, he goes on, or allows Mr Geake to go on, quite as
though he had verified matters and found that I was wrong as
regards the facts on which I based my appeal to him for
recognition of Thoreau as having influenced Stevenson in
style.  Had he attended to correcting his serious errors
about Stevenson, and some at least of those about Burns, thus
adding, say, a dozen or twenty pages to his book wholly fresh and
new and accurate, then the Times could not have got, even
if it had sought, an injunction against his publishers and him;
and there would have been no necessity that he should pad out
other and later speeches by just a little whining over what was
entirely due to his own disregard of good advice, his own
neglect—his own fault—a neglect and a fault showing
determination not to revise where revision in justice to his
subject’s own free and frank acknowledgments made it most
essential and necessary.

Mr Justice North gave his decision against Lord Rosebery and
his publishers, while the Lords of Appeal went in his favour; but
the House of Lords reaffirmed the decision of Mr Justice North
and granted a perpetual injunction against this book.  The
copyright in his speech is Lord Rosebery’s, but the
copyright in the Times’ report is the
Times’.  You see one of the ideas underlying
the law is that no manner of speech is quite perfect as the man
speaks it, or is beyond revision, improvement, or extension, and,
if there is but one verbatim report, as was the case of
some of these speeches and addresses, then it is incumbent on the
author, if he wishes to preserve his copyright, to revise and
correct his speeches and addresses, so as to make them at least
in details so far differ from the reported form.  This thing
ought Lord Rosebery to have done, on ethical and literary
grounds, not to speak of legal and self-interested
grounds; and I, for one, who from the first held exactly the view
the House of Lords has affirmed, do confess that I have no
sympathy for Lord Rosebery, since he had before him the
suggestion and the materials for as substantial alterations and
additions from my own hands, with as much more for other portions
of his book, had he informed me of his appreciation, as would
have saved him and his book from such a sadly ironical fate as
has overtaken him and it.

From the whole business—since “free, gratis, for
nothing,” I offered him as good advice as any lawyer in the
three kingdoms could have done for large payment, and since he
never deemed it worth while, even to tell me the results of his
reference to Familiar Studies, I here and now say
deliberately that his conduct to me was scarcely so courteous and
grateful and graceful as it might have been.  How
different—very different—the way in which the late R.
L. Stevenson rewarded me for a literary service no whit greater
or more essentially valuable to him than this service rendered to
Lord Rosebery might have been to him.

This chapter would most probably not have been printed, had
not Mr Coates re-issued the inadequate and most misleading
paragraph about Mr Stevenson and style in his Lord
Rosebery’s Life and Speeches exactly as it was
before, thus perpetuating at once the error and the wrong, in
spite of all my trouble, warnings, and protests.  It is a
tragicomedy, if not a farce altogether, considering who are the
principal actors in it.  And let those who have copies of
the queer prohibited book cherish them and thank me; for that I
do by this give a new interest and value to it as a curiosity,
law-inhibited, if not as high and conscientious
literature—which it is not.

I remember very well about the time Lord Rosebery spoke on
Burns, and Stevenson, and London, that certain London papers
spoke of his deliverances as indicating more
knowledge—fuller and exacter knowledge—of all these
subjects than the greatest professed experts possessed. 
That is their extravagant and most reckless way, especially if
the person spoken about is a “great politician” or a
man of rank.  They think they are safe with such
superlatives applied to a brilliant and clever peer (with large
estates and many interests), and an ex-Prime Minister!  But
literature is a republic, and it must here be said, though all
unwillingly, that Lord Rosebery is but an amateur—a
superficial though a clever amateur after all, and their
extravagances do not change the fact.  I declare him an
amateur in Burns’ literature and study because of what I
have said elsewhere, and there are many points to add to that if
need were.  I have proved above from his own words that he
was crassly and unpardonably ignorant of some of the most
important points in R. L. Stevenson’s development when he
delivered that address in Edinburgh on Stevenson—a thing
very, very pardonable—seeing that he is run after to do
“speakings” of this sort; but to go on, in face of
such warning and protest, printing his most misleading errors is
not pardonable, and the legal recorded result is my justification
and his condemnation, the more surely that even that would not
awaken him so far as to cause him to restrain Mr Coates from
reproducing in his Life and Speeches, just as it was
originally, that peccant passage.  I am fully ready to prove
also that, though Chairman of the London County Council for a
period, and though he made a very clever address at one of Sir W.
Besant’s lectures, there is much yet—very
much—he might learn from Sir W. Besant’s writings on
London.  It isn’t so easy to outshine all the
experts—even for a clever peer who has been Prime Minister,
though it is very, very easy to flatter Lord Rosebery, with a
purpose or purposes, as did at least once also with rarest tact,
at Glasgow, indicating so many other things and possibilities, a
certain very courtly ex-Moderator of the Church of Scotland.

CHAPTER XXXI—MR GOSSE AND MS. OF TREASURE
ISLAND

Mr Edmund Gosse has been so good as to set down, with rather
an air of too much authority, that both R. L. Stevenson and I
deceived ourselves completely in the matter of my little share in
the Treasure Island business, and that too much credit was
sought by me or given to me, for the little service I rendered to
R. L. Stevenson, and to the world, say, in helping to secure for
it an element of pleasure through many generations.  I have
not sought any recognition from the world in this matter,
and even the mention of it became so intolerable to me that I
eschewed all writing about it, in the face of the most stupid and
misleading statements, till Mr Sidney Colvin wrote and asked me
to set down my account of the matter in my own words.  This
I did, as it would have been really rude to refuse a request so
graciously made, and the reader has it in the Academy of
10th March 1900.  Nevertheless, Mr Gosse’s statements
were revived and quoted, and the thing seemed ever to revolve
again in a round of controversy.

Now, with regard to the reliability in this matter of Mr
Edmund Gosse, let me copy here a little note made at request some
time ago, dealing with two points.  The first is this:

1. Most assuredly I carried away from Braemar in my
portmanteau, as R. L. Stevenson says in Idler’s
article and in chapter of My First Book reprinted in
Edinburgh Edition, several chapters of Treasure
Island.  On that point R. L. Stevenson, myself, and Mr
James Henderson, to whom I took these, could not all be wrong and
co-operating to mislead the public.  These chapters, at
least vii. or viii., as Mr Henderson remembers, would include the
first three, that is, finally revised versions for
press.  Mr Gosse could not then have heard R. L.
Stevenson read from these final versions but from first
draughts only, and I am positively
certain that with some of the later chapters R. L. Stevenson
wrote them off-hand, and with great ease, and did not revise them
to the extent of at all needing to re-write them, as I remember
he was proud to tell me, being then fully in the vein, as he put
it, and pleased to credit me with a share in this good result,
and saying “my enthusiasm over it had set him up
steep.”  There was then, in my idea, a necessity that
Stevenson should fill up a gap by verbal summary to Mr Gosse
(which Mr Gosse has forgotten), bringing the incident up to a
further point than Mr Gosse now thinks.  I am certain of my
facts under this head; and as Mr Gosse clearly fancies he heard
R. L. Stevenson read all from final versions and is
mistaken—completely mistaken there—he may be
just as wrong and the victim of error or bad memory elsewhere
after the lapse of more than twenty years.

2. I gave the pencilled outline of incident and plot to Mr
Henderson—a fact he distinctly remembers.  This fact
completely meets and disposes of Mr Robert Leighton’s quite
imaginative Billy Bo’sun notion, and is absolute as
to R. L. Stevenson before he left Braemar on the 21st September
1881, or even before I left it on 26th August 1881, having clear
in his mind the whole scheme of the work, though we know very
well that the absolute re-writing out finally for press of the
concluding part of the book was done at Davos.  Mr Henderson
has always made it the strictest rule in his editorship that the
complete outline of the plot and incident of the latter part of a
story must be supplied to him, if the whole story is not
submitted to him in MS.; and the agreement, if I am not much
mistaken, was entered into days before R. L. Stevenson left
Braemar, and when he came up to London some short time after to
go to Weybridge, the only arrangement then needed to be made was
about the forwarding of proofs to him.

The publication of Treasure Island in Young
Folks began on the 1st October 1881, No. 565 and ran on in
the following order:

October 1,
1881.
THE PROLOGUE

No. 565.
I. The Old Sea Dog at the Admiral Benbow.
II. Black Dog Appears and Disappears.

No. 566.
Dated October 8, 1881.
III. The Black Spot.

No. 567.
Dated October 15, 1881.
IV. The Sea Chart.
V. The Last of the Blind Man.
VI. The Captain’s Papers.

No. 568.
Dated October 22, 1881.
THE STORY
I. I go to Bristol.
II. The Sea-Cook.
Ill.  Powder and Arms.

Now, as the numbers of Young Folks were printed about a
fortnight in advance of the date they bear under the title, it is
clear that not only must the contract have been executed days
before the middle of September, but that a large proportion of
the copy must have been in Mr Henderson’s hands at
that date too, as he must have been entirely satisfied that the
story would go on and be finished in a definite time.  On no
other terms would he have begun the publication of it.  He
was not in the least likely to have accepted a story from a man
who, though known as an essayist, had not yet published anything
in the way of a long story, on the ground merely of three
chapters of prologue.  Mr Gosse left Braemar on 5th
September, when he says nine chapters were written, and Mr
Henderson had offered terms for the story before the last of
these could have reached him.  That is on seeing, say six
chapters of prologue.  But when Mr Gosse speaks about three
chapters only written, does he mean three of the prologue or
three of the story, in addition to prologue, or what does he
mean?  The facts are clear.  I took away in my
portmanteau a large portion of the MS., together with a very full
outline of the rest of the story, so that Mr Stevenson was,
despite Mr Gosse’s cavillings, substantially right
when he wrote in My First Book in the Idler, etc.,
that “when he (Dr Japp) left us he carried away the
manuscript in his portmanteau.”  There was nothing of
the nature of an abandonment of the story at any point, nor any
difficulty whatever arose in this respect in regard to it.

CHAPTER XXXII—STEVENSON PORTRAITS

Of the portraits of Stevenson a word or two may be said. 
There is a very good early photograph of him, taken not very long
before the date of my visit to him at Braemar in 1881, and is an
admirable likeness—characteristic not only in expression,
but in pose and attitude, for it fixes him in a favourite
position of his; and is, at the same time, very easy and
natural.  The velvet jacket, as I have remarked, was then
his habitual wear, and the thin fingers holding the constant
cigarette an inseparable associate and accompaniment.

He acknowledged himself that he was a difficult subject to
paint—not at all a good sitter—impatient and apt to
rebel at posing and time spent in arrangement of details—a
fact he has himself, as we shall see, set on record in his funny
verses to Count Nerli, who painted as successful a portrait as
any.  The little miniature, full-length, by Mr J. S.
Sarjent, A.R.A., which was painted at Bournemouth in 1885, is
confessedly a mere sketch and much of a caricature: it is in
America.  Sir W. B. Richmond has an unfinished portrait,
painted in 1885 or 1886—it has never passed out of the
hands of the artist,—a photogravure from it is our
frontispiece.

There is a medallion done by St Gauden’s, representing
Stevenson in bed propped up by pillows.  It is thought to be
a pretty good likeness, and it is now in Mr Sidney Colvin’s
possession.  Others, drawings, etc., are not of much
account.

And now we come to the Nerli portrait, of which so much has
been written.  Stevenson himself regarded it as the best
portrait of him ever painted, and certainly it also is
characteristic and effective, and though not what may be called a
pleasant likeness, is probably a good representation of him in
the later years of his life.  Count Nerli actually undertook
a voyage to Samoa in 1892, mainly with the idea of painting this
portrait.  He and Stevenson became great friends, as
Stevenson naïvely tells in the verses we have already
referred to, but even this did not quite overcome
Stevenson’s restlessness.  He avenged himself by
composing these verses as he sat:

Did ever mortal man hear tell o’ sic a
ticklin’ ferlie
As the comin’ on to Apia here o’ the painter Mr
Nerli?
He cam’; and, O, for o’ human freen’s o’
a’ he was the pearlie—
The pearl o’ a’ the painter folk was surely Mr
Nerli.
He took a thraw to paint mysel’; he painted late and
early;
O wow! the many a yawn I’ve yawned i’ the beard
o’ Mr Nerli.
Whiles I wad sleep and whiles wad wake, an’ whiles was mair
than surly;
I wondered sair as I sat there fornent the eyes o’
Nerli.
O will he paint me the way I want, as bonnie as a girlie?
O will he paint me an ugly tyke?—and be d-d to Mr Nerli.
But still an’ on whichever it be, he is a canty kerlie,
The Lord protect the back an’ neck o’ honest Mr
Nerli.

Mr Hammerton gives this account of the Nerli portrait:

“The history of the Nerli portrait is
peculiar.  After being exhibited for some time in New
Zealand it was bought, in the course of this year, by a lady who
was travelling there, for a hundred guineas.  She then
offered it for that sum to the Scottish National Portrait
Gallery; but the Trustees of the Board of Manufactures—that
oddly named body to which is entrusted the fostering care of Art
in Scotland, and, in consequence, the superintendence of the
National Portrait Gallery—did not see their way to accept
the offer.  Some surprise has been expressed at the action
of the Trustees in thus declining to avail themselves of the
opportunity of obtaining the portrait of one of the most
distinguished Scotsmen of recent times.  It can hardly have
been for want of money, for though the funds at their disposal
for the purchase of ordinary works of art are but limited, no
longer ago than last year they were the recipients of a very
handsome legacy from the late Mr J. M. Gray, the accomplished and
much lamented Curator of the Scottish National Portrait
Gallery—a legacy left them for the express purpose of
acquiring portraits of distinguished Scotsmen, and the income of
which was amply sufficient to have enabled them to purchase this
portrait.  One is therefore almost shut up to the conclusion
that the Trustees were influenced in their decision by one of the
two following reasons:

“1. That they did not consider Stevenson worthy of a
place in the gallery.  This is a position so
incomprehensible and so utterly opposed to public sentiment that
one can hardly credit it having been the cause of this
refusal.  Whatever may be the place which Stevenson may
ultimately take as an author, and however opinions may differ as
to the merits of his work, no one can deny that he was one of the
most popular writers of his day, and that as a mere master of
style, if for nothing else, his works will be read so long as
there are students of English Literature.  Surely the
portrait of one for whom such a claim may legitimately be made
cannot be considered altogether unworthy of a place in the
National Collection, as one of Scotland’s most
distinguished sons.

“2. The only other reason which can be suggested as
having weighed with the Trustees in their decision is one which
in some cases might be held to be worthy of consideration. 
It is conceivable that in the case of some men the Trustees might
be of opinion that there was plenty of time to consider the
matter, and that in the meantime there was always the chance of
some generous donor presenting them with a portrait.  But,
as has been shown above, the portraits of Stevenson are
practically confined to two: one of these is in America, and
there is not the least chance of its ever coming here; and the
other they have refused.  And, as it is understood that the
Trustees have a rule that they do not accept any portrait which
has not been painted from the life, they preclude themselves from
acquiring a copy of any existing picture or even a portrait done
from memory.

“It is rumoured that the Nerli portrait may ultimately
find a resting-place in the National Collection of Portraits in
London.  If this should prove to be the case, what a
commentary on the old saying: ‘A prophet is not without
honour save in his own country.’”

CHAPTER XXXIII—LAPSES AND ERRORS IN CRITICISM

Nothing could perhaps be more wearisome than to travel
o’er the wide sandy area of Stevenson criticism and
commentary, and expose the many and sad and grotesque errors that
meet one there.  Mr Baildon’s slip is innocent,
compared with many when he says (p. 106) Treasure Island
appeared in Young Folks as The Sea-Cook.  It
did nothing of the kind; it is on plain record in print, even in
the pages of the Edinburgh Edition, that Mr James
Henderson would not have the title The Sea-Cook, as he did
not like it, and insisted on its being Treasure
Island.  To him, therefore, the vastly better title is
due.  Mr Henley was in doubt if Mr Henderson was still alive
when he wrote the brilliant and elevated article on “Some
Novels” in the North American, and as a certain dark
bird killed Cock Robin, so he killed off Dr Japp, and not to be
outdone, got in an ideal “Colonel” Jack; so Mr
Baildon there follows Henley, unaware that Mr Henderson did not
like The Sea-Cook, and was still alive, and that a certain
Jack in the fatal North American has Japp’s
credit.

Mr Baildon’s words are:

“This was the famous book of adventure,
Treasure Island, appearing first as The Sea-Cook in
a boy’s paper, where it made no great stir.  But, on
its publication in volume form, with the vastly better title, the
book at once ‘boomed,’ as the phrase goes, to an
extent then, in 1882, almost unprecedented.  The secret of
its immense success may almost be expressed in a phrase by saying
that it is a book like Gulliver’s Travels, The
Pilgrim’s Progress, and Robinson Crusoe itself
for all ages—boys, men, and women.”

Which just shows how far lapse as to a fact may lead to
critical misreadings also.

Mr Hammerton sometimes lets good folks say in his pages,
without correction, what is certainly not correct.  Thus at
one place we are told that Stevenson was only known as Louis in
print, whereas that was the only name by which he was known in
his own family.  Then Mr Gosse, at p. 34, is allowed to
write:

“Professor Blackie was among them on the
steamer from the Hebrides, a famous figure that calls for no
description, and a voluble shaggy man, clad in homespun, with
spectacles forward upon his nose, who it was whispered to us, was
Mr Sam Bough, the Scottish Academician, a water-colour painter
of some repute, who was to die in 1878.”

Mr Sam Bough was “a water-colour painter of some
repute,” but a painter in oils of yet greater
repute—a man of rare strength, resource, and
facility—never, perhaps, wholly escaping from some traces
of his early experiences in scene-painting, but a true genius in
his art.  Ah, well I remember him, though an older man, yet
youthful in the band of young Scotch artists among whom as a
youngster I was privileged to move in Edinburgh—Pettie,
Chalmers, M’Whirter, Peter Graham, MacTaggart, MacDonald,
John Burr, and Bough.  Bough could be voluble on art; and
many a talk I had with him as with the others named, especially
with John Burr.  Bough and he both could talk as well as
paint, and talk right well.  Bough had a slight cast in the
eye; when he got a wee excited on his subject he would
come close to you with head shaking, and spectacles displaced,
and forelock wagging, and the cast would seem to die away. 
Was this a fact, or was it an illusion on my part?  I have
often asked myself that question, and now I ask it of
others.  Can any of my good friends in Edinburgh say; can Mr
Caw help me here, either to confirm or to correct me?  I
venture to insert here an anecdote, with which my friend of old
days, Mr Wm. MacTaggart, R.S.A., in a letter kindly favours
me:

“Sam Bough was a very sociable man; and,
when on a sketching tour, liked to have a young artist or two
with him.  Jack Nisbett played the violin, and Sam the
’cello, etc.  Jack was fond of telling that Sam used
to let them all choose the best views, and then he would take
what was left; and Jack, with mild astonishment, would say, that
‘it generally turned out to be the best—on the
canvas!’”

In Mr Hammerton’s copy of the verses in reply to Mr
Crockett’s dedication of The Stickit Minister to
Stevenson, in which occurred the fine phrase “The grey
Galloway lands, where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups
are crying, his heart remembers how”:

“Blows the wind to-day and the sun and the
rain are flying:
   Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now,
Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying,
   My heart remembers how.

“Grey recumbent tombs of the dead in desert places,
   Standing stones on the vacant wine-red moor,
Hills of sheep, and the homes of the silent vanished
races,
   And winds austere and pure.

“Be it granted me to behold you again in dying,
   Hills of home! and to hear again the call—
Hear about the graves of the martyrs the pee-weet crying,
   And hear no more at all.”

Mr Hammerton prints howes instead of homes,
which I have italicised above.  And I may note, though it
does not affect the poetry, if it does a little affect the
natural history, that the pee-weets and the whaups are not
the same—the one is the curlew, and the other is the
lapwing—the one most frequenting wild, heathery or peaty
moorland, and the other pasture or even ploughed land—so
that it is a great pity for unity and simplicity alike that
Stevenson did not repeat the “whaup,” but wrote
rather as though pee-weet or pee-weets were the same as
whaups—the common call of the one is Ker-lee,
ker-lee, and of the other pee-weet,
pee-weet, hence its common name.

It is a pity, too, that Mr Hammerton has no records of some
portions of the life at Davos Platz.  Not only was Stevenson
ill there in April 1892, but his wife collapsed, and the tender
concern for her made havoc with some details of his literary
work.  It is good to know this.  Such errata or
omissions throw a finer light on his character than controlling
perfection would do.  Ah, I remember how my old friend W. B.
Rands (“Matthew Browne” and “Henry
Holbeach”) was wont to declare that were men perfect they
would be isolated, if not idiotic, that we are united to each
other by our defects—that even physical beauty would be
dead like later Greek statues, were these not departures from the
perfect lines.  The letter given by me at p. 28 transfigures
in its light, some of his work at that time.

And then what an opportunity, we deeply regret to say, Mr
Hammerton wholly missed, when he passed over without due
explanation or commentary that most significant
pamphlet—the Address to the Scottish Clergy. 
If Mr Hammerton had but duly and closely studied that and its
bearings and suggestions in many directions, then he would have
written such a chapter for true enlightenment and for interest as
exactly his book—attractive though it is in much—yet
specially lacks.  It is to be hoped that Mr Sidney Colvin
will not once more miss the chance which is thus still left open
to him to perfect his Life of Stevenson, and make it more
interpretive than anything yet published.  If he does this,
then, a dreadful lacuna in the Edinburgh Edition
will also be supplied.

Carefully reading over again Mr Arthur Symons’
Studies in Two Literatures—published some years
ago—I have come across instances of apparent contradiction
which, so far as I can see, he does not critically altogether
reconcile, despite his ingenuity and great charm of style. 
One relates to Thoreau, who, while still “sturdy” as
Emerson says, “and like an elm tree,” as his sister
Sophia says, showed exactly the same love of nature and power of
interpreting her as he did after in his later comparatively short
period of “invalidity,” while Mr Symons says his view
of Nature absolutely was that of the invalid, classing him
unqualifiedly with Jefferies and Stevenson, as invalid. 
Thoreau’s mark even in the short later period of
“invalidity” was complete and robust independence and
triumph over it—a thing which I have no doubt wholly
captivated Stevenson, as scarce anything else would have done, as
a victory in the exact rôle he himself was most
ambitious to fill.  For did not he too wrestle well with the
“wolverine” he carried on his back—in this like
Addington Symonds and Alexander Pope?  Surely I cannot be
wrong here to reinforce my statement by a passage from a letter
written by Sophia Thoreau to her good friend Daniel Ricketson,
after her brother’s death, the more that R. L. Stevenson
would have greatly exulted too in its cheery and invincible
stoicism:

“Profound joy mingles with my grief.  I
feel as if something very beautiful had happened—not death;
although Henry is with us no longer, yet the memory of his sweet
and virtuous soul must ever cheer and comfort me.  My heart
is filled with praise to God for the gift of such a brother, and
may I never distrust the love and wisdom of Him who made him and
who has now called him to labour in more glorious fields than
earth affords.  You ask for some particulars relating to
Henry’s illness.  I feel like saying that Henry was
never affected, never reached by it.  I never before saw
such a manifestation of the power of spirit over matter. 
Very often I heard him tell his visitors that he enjoyed
existence as well as ever.  The thought of death, he said,
did not trouble him.  His thoughts had entertained him all
his life and did still. . . . He considered occupation as
necessary for the sick as for those in health, and accomplished a
vast amount of labour in those last few months.”

A rare “invalidity” this—a little confusing
easy classifications.  I think Stevenson would have felt and
said that brother and sister were well worthy of each other; and
that the sister was almost as grand and cheery a stoic, with no
literary profession of it, as was the brother.

The other thing relates to Stevenson’s human
soul.  I find Mr Symons says, at p. 243, that Stevenson
“had something a trifle elfish and uncanny about him, as of
a bewitched being who was not actually human—had not
actually a human soul”—in which there may be a
glimmer of truth viewed from his revelation of artistic
curiosities in some aspects, but is hardly true of him otherwise;
and this Mr Symons himself seems to have felt, when, at p. 246,
he writes: “He is one of those writers who speak to us
on easy terms, with whom we may exchange
affections.”  How “affections” could
be exchanged on easy terms between the normal human being and an
elfish creature actually without a human soul (seeing that
affections are, as Mr Matthew Arnold might have said, at least,
three-fourths of soul) is more, I confess, than I can quite see
at present; but in this rather maladroit contradiction Mr
Symons does point at one phase of the problem of
Stevenson—this, namely that to all the ordinary happy or
pleasure-endings he opposes, as it were of set purpose, gloom, as
though to certain things he was quite indifferent, and though, as
we have seen, his actual life and practice were quite opposed to
this.

I am sorry I cannot find the link in Mr Symons’
essay, which would quite make these two statements consistently
coincide critically.  As an enthusiastic, though I hope
still a discriminating, Stevensonian, I do wish Mr Symons would
help us to it somehow hereafter.  It would be well worth his
doing, in my opinion.

CHAPTER XXXIV—LETTERS AND POEMS IN TESTIMONY

Among many letters received by me in acknowledgment of, or in
commentary on, my little tributes to R. L. Stevenson, in various
journals and magazines, I find the following, which I give here
for reasons purely personal, and because my readers may with me,
join in admiration of the fancy, grace and beauty of the
poems.  I must preface the first poem by a letter, which
explains the genesis of the poem, and relates a striking and very
touching incident:

“37 St Donatt’s Road,
Lewisham High Road, S.E.,
1st March 1895.

“Dear Sir,—As you have
written so much about your friend, the late Robert Louis
Stevenson, and quoted many tributes to his genius from
contemporary writers, I take the liberty of sending you herewith
some verses of mine which appeared in The Weekly Sun of
November last.  I sent a copy of these verses to Samoa, but
unfortunately the great novelist died before they reached
it.  I have, however, this week, received a little note from
Mrs Strong, which runs as follows:

“‘Your poem of “Greeting” came too
late.  I can only thank you by sending a little moss that I
plucked from a tree overhanging his grave on Vaea
Mountain.’

“I trust you will appreciate my motive in sending you
the poem.  I do not wish to obtrude my claims as a
verse-writer upon your notice, but I thought the incident I have
recited would be interesting to one who is so devoted a collector
of Stevensoniana.—Respectfully yours,

F. J. Cox.”

GREETING

(TO ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, IN SAMOA)

We, pent in cities, prisoned in the mart,
Can know you only as a man apart,
But ever-present through your matchless art.

You have exchanged the old, familiar ways
For isles, where, through the range of splendid days,
Her treasure Nature lavishly displays.

There, by the gracious sweep of ampler seas,
That swell responsive to the odorous breeze.
You have the wine of Life, and we the lees!

You mark, perchance, within your island bowers,
The slow departure of the languorous hours,
And breathe the sweetness of the strange wild-flowers.

And everything your soul and sense delights—
But in the solemn wonder of your nights,
When Peace her message on the landscape writes;

When Ocean scarcely flecks her marge with foam—
Your thoughts must sometimes from your island roam,
To centre on the sober face of Home.

Though many a league of water rolls between
The simple beauty of an English scene,
From all these wilder charms your love may wean.

Some kindly sprite may bring you as a boon
Sweets from the rose that crowns imperial June,
Or reminiscence of the throstle’s tune;

Yea, gladly grant you, with a generous hand,
Far glimpses of the winding, wind-swept strand,
The glens and mountains of your native land,

Until you hear the pipes upon the breeze—
But wake unto the wild realities
The tangled forests and the boundless seas!

For lo! the moonless night has passed away,
A sudden dawn dispels the shadows grey,
The glad sea moves and hails the quickening day.

New life within the arbours of your fief
Awakes the blossom, quivers in the leaf,
And splendour flames upon the coral reef.

If such a prospect stimulate your art,
More than our meadows where the shadows dart,
More than the life which throbs in London’s heart,

Then stay, encircled by your Southern bowers,
And weave, amid the incense of the flowers,
The skein of fair romance—the gain is ours!

F. J.
Cox.

Weekly Sun, 11th
November 1904.

R. L. S., IN MEMORIAM.

An elfin wight as e’er from faeryland
   Came to us straight with favour in his eyes,
   Of wondrous seed that led him to the prize
Of fancy, with the magic rod in hand.
Ah, there in faeryland we saw him stand,
   As for a while he walked with smiles and sighs,
   Amongst us, finding still the gem that buys
Delight and joy at genius’s command.

And now thy place is empty: fare thee well;
   Thou livest still in hearts that owe thee more
   Than gold can reckon; for thy richer store
Is of the good that with us aye most dwell.
   Farewell; sleep sound on Vaea’s windy
shrine,
   While round the songsters join their song to
thine.

A. C. R.

APPENDIX

The following appeared some time ago in one of the London
evening papers, and I make bold, because of its truth and vigour,
to insert it here:

THE LAND OF STEVENSON,
ON AN AFTERNOON’S WALK

Will there be a “Land of Stevenson,” as there is
already a “Land of Burns,” or a “Land of
Scott,” known to the tourist, bescribbled by the guide-book
maker?  This the future must tell.  Yet will it be easy
to mark out the bounds of “Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Country”; and, taking his native and well-loved city for a
starting-point, a stout walker may visit all its principal sites
in an afternoon.  The house where he was born is within a
bowshot of the Water of Leith; some five miles to the south are
Caerketton and Allermuir, and other crests of the Pentlands, and
below them Swanston Farm, where year after year, in his
father’s time, he spent the summer days basking on the hill
slopes; two or three miles to the westward of Swanston is
Colinton, where his mother’s father, Dr Balfour, was
minister; and here again you are back to the Water of Leith,
which you can follow down to the New Town.  In this
triangular space Stevenson’s memories and affections were
firmly rooted; the fibres could not be withdrawn from the soil,
and “the voice of the blood” and the longing for this
little piece of earth make themselves plaintively heard in his
last notes.  By Lothian Road, after which Stevenson quaintly
thought of naming the new edition of his works, and past
Boroughmuirhead and the “Bore Stane,” where James
FitzJames set up his standard before Flodden, wends your
southward way to the hills.  The builder of suburban villas
has pushed his handiwork far into the fields since Stevenson was
wont to tramp between the city and the Pentlands; and you may
look in vain for the flat stone whereon, as the marvelling child
was told, there once rose a “crow-haunted
gibbet.”  Three-quarters of an hour of easy walking,
after you have cleared the last of the houses will bring you to
Swanston; and half an hour more will take the stiff climber, a
little breathless, to

THE TOP OF CAERKETTON CRAGS.

You may follow the high road—indeed there is a choice of
two, drawn at different levels—athwart the western skirts
of the Braid Hills, now tenanted, crown and sides of them, by
golf; then to the crossroads of Fairmilehead, whence the road
dips down, to rise again and circumvent the most easterly wing of
the Pentlands.  You would like to pursue this route, were it
only to look down on Bow Bridge and recall how the last-century
gauger used to put together his flute and play “Over the
hills and far away” as a signal to his friend in the
distillery below, now converted into a dairy farm, to stow away
his barrels.  Better it is, however, to climb the stile just
past the poor-house gate, and follow the footpath along the
smoothly scooped banks of the Braid Burn to
“Cockmylane” and to Comiston.  The wind has been
busy all the morning spreading the snow over a glittering
world.  The drifts are piled shoulder-high in the lane as it
approaches Comiston, and each old tree grouped around the
historic mansion is outlined in snow so virgin pure that were the
Ghost—“a lady in white, with the most beautiful clear
shoes on her feet”—to step out through the back gate,
she would be invisible, unless, indeed, she were between you and
the ivy-draped dovecot wall.  Near by, at the corner of the
Dreghorn Woods, is the Hunters’ Tryst, on the roof of
which, when it was still a wayside inn, the Devil was wont to
dance on windy nights.  In the field through which you
trudge knee-deep in drift rises the “Kay Stane,”
looking to-day like a tall monolith of whitest marble. 
Stevenson was mistaken when he said that it was from its top a
neighbouring laird, on pain of losing his lands, had to
“wind a blast of bugle horn” each time the King

VISITED HIS FOREST OF PENTLAND.

That honour belongs to another on the adjacent farm of
Buckstane.  The ancient monument carries you further back,
and there are Celtic authorities that translate its name the
“Stone of Victory.”  The “Pechtland
Hills”—their elder name—were once a refuge for
the Picts; and Caerketton—probably Caer-etin, the
giant’s strong-hold—is one of them.  Darkly its
cliffs frown down upon you, while all else is flashing white in
the winter sunlight.  For once, in this last buttress thrown
out into the plain of Lothian towards the royal city, the outer
folds of the Pentlands loses its boldly-rounded curves, and drops
an almost sheer descent of black rock to the little glen
below.  In a wrinkle of the foothills Swanston farm and
hamlet are snugly tucked away.  The spirit that breathes
about it in summer time is gently pastoral.  It is sheltered
from the rougher blasts; it is set about with trees and green
hills.  It was with this aspect of the place that Stevenson,
coming hither on holiday, was best acquainted.  The village
green, whereon the windows of the neat white cottages turn a
kindly gaze under low brows of thatch, is then a perfect place in
which to rest, and, watching the smoke rising and listening to
“the leaves ruffling in the breeze,” to muse on men
and things; especially on Sabbath mornings, when the ploughman or
shepherd, “perplext wi’ leisure,” it is time to
set forth on the three-mile walk along the hill-skirts to
Colinton kirk.  But Swanston in winter time must also

HAVE BEEN FAMILIAR TO STEVENSON.

Snow-wreathed Pentlands, the ribbed and furrowed front of
Caerketton, the low sun striking athwart the sloping fields of
white, the shadows creeping out from the hills, and the frosty
yellow fog drawing in from the Firth—must often have
flashed back on the thoughts of the exile of Samoa.  Against
this wintry background the white farmhouse, old and crow-stepped,
looks dingy enough; the garden is heaped with the fantastic
treasures of the snow; and when you toil heavily up the waterside
to the clump of pines and beeches you find yourself in a fairy
forest.  One need not search to-day for the pool where the
lynx-eyed John Todd, “the oldest herd on the
Pentlands,” watched from behind the low scrag of wood the
stranger collie come furtively to wash away the tell-tale stains
of lamb’s blood.  The effacing hand of the snow has
smothered it over.  Higher you mount, mid leg-deep in drift,
up the steep and slippery hill-face, to the summit. 
Edinburgh has been creeping nearer since Stevenson’s musing
fancy began to draw on the memories of the climbs up “steep
Caerketton.”  But this light gives it a mystic
distance; and it is all glitter and shadow.  Arthur Seat is
like some great sea monster stranded near a city of dreams; from
the fog-swathed Firth gleams the white walls of Inchkeith
lighthouse, a mark never missed by Stevenson’s
father’s son; above Fife rise the twin breasts of the
Lomonds.  Or turn round and look across the Esk valley to
the Moorfoots; or more westerly, where the back range of the
Pentlands—Caernethy, the Scald, and the knife-edged
Kips—draw a sharp silhouette of Arctic peaks against the
sky.  In the cloven hollow between is Glencarse Loch, an
ancient chapel and burying ground hidden under its waters; on the
slope above it, not a couple miles away, is Rullion Green, where,
as Stevenson told in The Pentland Rising (his first
printed work)

THE WESTLAND WHIGS WERE SCATTERED

as chaff on the hills.  Were “topmost
Allermuir,” that rises close beside you, removed from his
place, we might see the gap in the range through which Tom
Dalyell and his troopers spurred from Currie to the fray. 
The air on these heights is invigorating as wine; but it is also
keen as a razor.  Without delaying long yon plunge down to
the “Windy Door Nick”; follow the “nameless
trickle that springs from the green bosom of Allermuir,”
past the rock and pool, where, on summer evenings, the poet
“loved to sit and make bad verses”; and cross
Halkerside and the Shearers’ Knowe, those “adjacent
cantons on a single shoulder of a hill,” sometimes
floundering to the neck in the loose snow of a drain, sometimes
scaring the sheep huddling in the wreaths, or putting up a covey
of moorfowl that circle back without a cry to cover in the
ling.  In an hour you are at Colinton, whose dell has on one
side the manse garden, where a bright-eyed boy, who was to become
famous, spent so much of his time when he came thither on visits
to his stern Presbyterian grandfather; on the other the old
churchyard.  The snow has drawn its cloak of ermine over the
sleepers, it has run its fingers over the worn lettering; and
records almost effaced start out from the stone.  In vain
these “voices of generations dead” summon their
wandering child, though you might deem that his spirit would rest
more quietly where the cold breeze from Pentland shakes the
ghostly trees in Colinton Dell than “under the flailing
fans and shadows of the palm.”

Footnotes:

[1]  Professor Charles Warren Stoddard,
Professor of English Literature at the Catholic University of
Washington, in Kate Field’s Washington.

[2]  In his portrait-sketch of his
father, Stevenson speaks of him as a “man of somewhat
antique strain, and with a blended sternness and softness that
was wholly Scottish, and at first sight somewhat
bewildering,” as melancholy, and with a keen sense of his
unworthiness, yet humorous in company; shrewd and childish; a
capital adviser.

[3]  Inferno, Canto XV.

[4]  Alas, I never was told that
remark—when I saw my friend afterwards there was always too
much to talk of else, and I forgot to ask.

[5]  Quoted by Hammerton, pp. 2 and
3.

[6]  Tusitala, as the reader must know,
is the Samoan for Teller of Tales.

[7]  Wisdom of Goethe, p.
38.

[8]  The Foreigner at Home, in
Memories and Portraits.

[9]  A great deal has been made of the
“John Bull element” in De Quincey since his
Memoir was written by me (see Masson’s
Condensation, p. 95); so now perhaps a little more may be
made of the rather conceited Calvinistic Scot element in R. L.
Stevenson!

[10]  It was Mr George Moore who said
this.

[11]  Fortnightly Review,
October, 1903.