Robert Louis Stevenson by Walter Raleigh.  1906 edition.


WHEN a popular writer dies, the question it has become the fashion 
with a nervous generation to ask is the question, 'Will he live?'  
There was no idler question, none more hopelessly impossible and 
unprofitable to answer.  It is one of the many vanities of 
criticism to promise immortality to the authors that it praises, to 
patronise a writer with the assurance that our great-grandchildren, 
whose time and tastes are thus frivolously mortgaged, will read his 
works with delight.  But 'there is no antidote against the opium of 
time, which temporally considereth all things: our fathers find 
their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be 
buried in our survivors.'  Let us make sure that our sons will care 
for Homer before we pledge a more distant generation to a newer 
cult.

Nevertheless, without handling the prickly question of literary 
immortality, it is easy to recognise that the literary reputation 
of Robert Louis Stevenson is made of good stuff.  His fame has 
spread, as lasting fame is wont to do, from the few to the many.  
Fifteen years ago his essays and fanciful books of travel were 
treasured by a small and discerning company of admirers; long 
before he chanced to fell the British public with TREASURE ISLAND 
and DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE he had shown himself a delicate 
marksman.  And although large editions are nothing, standard 
editions, richly furnished and complete, are worthy of remark.  
Stevenson is one of the very few authors in our literary history 
who have been honoured during their lifetime by the appearance of 
such an edition; the best of his public, it would seem, do not only 
wish to read his works, but to possess them, and all of them, at 
the cost of many pounds, in library form.  It would be easy to 
mention more voluminous and more popular authors than Stevenson 
whose publishers could not find five subscribers for an adventure 
like this.  He has made a brave beginning in that race against Time 
which all must lose.

It is not in the least necessary, after all, to fortify ourselves 
with the presumed consent of our poor descendants, who may have a 
world of other business to attend to, in order to establish 
Stevenson in the position of a great writer.  Let us leave that 
foolish trick to the politicians, who never claim that they are 
right - merely that they will win at the next elections.  Literary 
criticism has standards other than the suffrage; it is possible 
enough to say something of the literary quality of a work that 
appeared yesterday.  Stevenson himself was singularly free from the 
vanity of fame; 'the best artist,' he says truly, 'is not the man 
who fixes his eye on posterity, but the one who loves the practice 
of his art.'  He loved, if ever man did, the practice of his art; 
and those who find meat and drink in the delight of watching and 
appreciating the skilful practice of the literary art, will abandon 
themselves to the enjoyment of his masterstrokes without teasing 
their unborn and possibly illiterate posterity to answer solemn 
questions.  Will a book live?  Will a cricket match live?  Perhaps 
not, and yet both be fine achievements.

It is not easy to estimate the loss to letters by his early death.  
In the dedication of PRINCE OTTO he says, 'Well, we will not give 
in that we are finally beaten. . . . I still mean to get my health 
again; I still purpose, by hook or crook, this book or the next, to 
launch a masterpiece.'  It would be a churlish or a very dainty 
critic who should deny that he has launched masterpieces, but 
whether he ever launched his masterpiece is an open question.  Of 
the story that he was writing just before his death he is reported 
to have said that 'the goodness of it frightened him.'  A goodness 
that frightened him will surely not be visible, like Banquo's 
ghost, to only one pair of eyes.  His greatest was perhaps yet to 
come.  Had Dryden died at his age, we should have had none of the 
great satires; had Scott died at his age, we should have had no 
Waverley Novels.  Dying at the height of his power, and in the full 
tide of thought and activity, he seems almost to have fulfilled the 
aspiration and unconscious prophecy of one of the early essays:



'Does not life go down with a better grace foaming in full body 
over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy 
deltas?

'When the Greeks made their fine saying that those whom the gods 
love die young, I cannot help believing that they had this sort of 
death also in their eye.  For surely, at whatever age it overtake 
the man, this is to die young.  Death has not been suffered to take 
so much as an illusion from his heart.  In the hot-fit of life, a-
tiptoe on the highest point of being, he passes at a bound on to 
the other side.  The noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely 
quenched, the trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, trailing with 
him clouds of glory, this happy starred, full-blooded spirit shoots 
into the spiritual land.'


But we on this side are the poorer - by how much we can never know.  
What strengthens the conviction that he might yet have surpassed 
himself and dwarfed his own best work is, certainly no immaturity, 
for the flavour of wisdom and old experience hangs about his 
earliest writings, but a vague sense awakened by that brilliant 
series of books, so diverse in theme, so slight often in structure 
and occasions so gaily executed, that here was a finished literary 
craftsman, who had served his period of apprenticeship and was 
playing with his tools.  The pleasure of wielding the graven tool, 
the itch of craftsmanship, was strong upon him, and many of the 
works he has left are the overflow of a laughing energy, arabesques 
carved on the rock in the artist's painless hours.

All art, it is true, is play of a sort; the 'sport-impulse' (to 
translate a German phrase) is deep at the root of the artist's 
power; Sophocles, Shakespeare, Moliere, and Goethe, in a very 
profound sense, make game of life.  But to make game of life was to 
each of these the very loftiest and most imperative employ to be 
found for him on this planet; to hold the mirror up to Nature so 
that for the first time she may see herself; to 'be a candle-holder 
and look on' at the pageantry which, but for the candle-holder, 
would huddle along in the undistinguishable blackness, filled them 
with the pride of place.  Stevenson had the sport-impulse at the 
depths of his nature, but he also had, perhaps he had inherited, an 
instinct for work in more blockish material, for lighthouse-
building and iron-founding.  In a 'Letter to a Young Artist,' 
contributed to a magazine years ago, he compares the artist in 
paint or in words to the keeper of a booth at the world's fair, 
dependent for his bread on his success in amusing others.  In his 
volume of poems he almost apologises for his excellence in 
literature:



'Say not of me, that weakly I declined
The labours of my sires, and fled the sea,
The towers we founded, and the lamps we lit,
To play at home with paper like a child;
But rather say: IN THE AFTERNOON OF TIME
A STRENUOUS FAMILY DUSTED FROM ITS HANDS
THE SAND OF GRANITE, AND BEHOLDING FAR
ALONG THE SOUNDING COASTS ITS PYRAMIDS
AND TALL MEMORIALS CATCH THE DYING SUN,
SMILED WELL-CONTENT, AND TO THIS CHILDISH TASK
AROUND THE FIRE ADDRESSED ITS EVENING HOURS.'


Some of his works are, no doubt, best described as paper-games.  In 
THE WRONG BOX, for instance, there is something very like the card-
game commonly called 'Old Maid'; the odd card is a superfluous 
corpse, and each dismayed recipient in turn assumes a disguise and 
a pseudonym and bravely passes on that uncomfortable inheritance.  
It is an admirable farce, hardly touched with grimness, unshaken by 
the breath of reality, full of fantastic character; the strange 
funeral procession is attended by shouts of glee at each of its 
stages, and finally melts into space.

But, when all is said, it is not with work of this kind that 
Olympus is stormed; art must be brought closer into relation with 
life, these airy and delightful freaks of fancy must be subdued to 
a serious scheme if they are to serve as credentials for a seat 
among the immortals.  The decorative painter, whose pencil runs so 
freely in limning these half-human processions of outlined fauns 
and wood-nymphs, is asked at last to paint an easel picture.

Stevenson is best where he shows most restraint, and his peculiarly 
rich fancy, which ran riot at the suggestion of every passing whim, 
gave him, what many a modern writer sadly lacks, plenty to 
restrain, an exuberant field for self-denial.  Here was an 
opportunity for art and labour; the luxuriance of the virgin 
forests of the West may be clipped and pruned for a lifetime with 
no fear of reducing them to the trim similitude of a Dutch garden.  
His bountiful and generous nature could profit by a spell of 
training that would emaciate a poorer stock.  From the first, his 
delight in earth and the earth-born was keen and multiform; his 
zest in life


'put a spirit of youth in everything,
That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him;'


and his fancy, light and quick as a child's, made of the world 
around him an enchanted pleasance.  The realism, as it is called, 
that deals only with the banalities and squalors of life, and 
weaves into the mesh of its story no character but would make you 
yawn if you passed ten minutes with him in a railway-carriage, 
might well take a lesson from this man, if it had the brains.  
Picture to yourself (it is not hard) an average suburb of London.  
The long rows of identical bilious brick houses, with the 
inevitable lace curtains, a symbol merely of the will and power to 
wash; the awful nondescript object, generally under glass, in the 
front window - the shrine of the unknown god of art; the sombre 
invariable citizen, whose garb gives no suggestion of his 
occupation or his tastes - a person, it would seem, only by 
courtesy; the piano-organ the music of the day, and the hideous 
voice of the vendor of half-penny papers the music of the night; 
could anything be less promising than such a row of houses for the 
theatre of romance?  Set a realist to walk down one of these 
streets: he will inquire about milk-bills and servants' wages, 
latch-keys and Sunday avocations, and come back with a tale of 
small meannesses and petty respectabilities, written in the 
approved modern fashion.  Yet Stevenson, it seems likely, could not 
pass along such a line of brick bandboxes without having his pulses 
set a-throbbing by the imaginative possibilities of the place.  Of 
his own Lieutenant Brackenbury Rich he says:



'The succession of faces in the lamplight stirred the lieutenant's 
imagination; and it seemed to him as if he could walk for ever in 
that stimulating city atmosphere and surrounded by the mystery of 
four million private lives.  He glanced at the houses and marvelled 
what was passing behind those warmly lighted windows; he looked 
into face after face, and saw them each intent upon some unknown 
interest, criminal or kindly.'


It was that same evening that Prince Florizel's friend, under the 
name of Mr. Morris, was giving a party in one of the houses of West 
Kensington.  In one at least of the houses of that brick wilderness 
human spirits were being tested as on an anvil, and most of them 
tossed aside.  So also, in, THE RAJAH'S DIAMOND, it was a quiet 
suburban garden that witnessed the sudden apparition of Mr. Harry 
Hartley and his treasures precipitated over the wall; it was in the 
same garden that the Rev.  Simon Rolles suddenly, to his own 
surprise, became a thief.  A monotony of bad building is no doubt a 
bad thing, but it cannot paralyse the activities or frustrate the 
agonies of the mind of man.

To a man with Stevenson's live and searching imagination, every 
work of human hands became vocal with possible associations.  
Buildings positively chattered to him; the little inn at 
Queensferry, which even for Scott had meant only mutton and currant 
jelly, with cranberries 'vera weel preserved,' gave him the 
cardinal incident of KIDNAPPED.  How should the world ever seem 
dull or sordid to one whom a railway-station would take into its 
confidence, to whom the very flagstones of the pavement told their 
story, in whose mind 'the effect of night, of any flowing water, of 
lighted cities, of the peep of day, of ships, of the open ocean,' 
called up 'an army of anonymous desires and pleasures'?  To have 
the 'golden-tongued Romance with serene lute' for a mistress and 
familiar is to be fortified against the assaults of tedium.

His attitude towards the surprising and momentous gifts of life was 
one prolonged passion of praise and joy.  There is none of his 
books that reads like the meditations of an invalid.  He has the 
readiest sympathy for all exhibitions of impulsive energy; his 
heart goes out to a sailor, and leaps into ecstasy over a generous 
adventurer or buccaneer.  Of one of his earlier books he says: 
'From the negative point of view I flatter myself this volume has a 
certain stamp.  Although it runs to considerably upwards of two 
hundred pages, it contains not a single reference to the imbecility 
of God's universe, nor so much as a single hint that I could have 
made a better one myself.'  And this was an omission that he never 
remedied in his later works.  Indeed, his zest in life, whether 
lived in the back gardens of a town or on the high seas, was so 
great that it seems probable the writer would have been lost had 
the man been dowered with better health.


'Whereas my birth and spirit rather took
The way that takes the town,
Thou didst betray me to a ling'ring book,
And wrap me in a gown,'


says George Herbert, who, in his earlier ambitions, would fain have 
ruffled it with the best at the court of King James.  But from 
Stevenson, although not only the town, but oceans and continents, 
beckoned him to deeds, no such wail escaped.  His indomitable 
cheerfulness was never embarked in the cock-boat of his own 
prosperity.  A high and simple courage shines through all his 
writings.  It is supposed to be a normal human feeling for those 
who are hale to sympathize with others who are in pain.  Stevenson 
reversed the position, and there is no braver spectacle in 
literature than to see him not asking others to lower their voices 
in his sick-room, but raising his own voice that he may make them 
feel at ease and avoid imposing his misfortunes on their notice.  
'Once when I was groaning aloud with physical pain,' he says in the 
essay on CHILD'S PLAY, 'a young gentleman came into the room and 
nonchalantly inquired if I had seen his bow and arrow.  He made no 
account of my groans, which he accepted, as he had to accept so 
much else, as a piece of the inexplicable conduct of his elders; 
and, like a wise young gentleman, he would waste no wonder on the 
subject.'  Was there ever a passage like this?  The sympathy of the 
writer is wholly with the child, and the child's absolute 
indifference to his own sufferings.  It might have been safely 
predicted that this man, should he ever attain to pathos, would be 
free from the facile, maudlin pathos of the hired sentimentalist.

And so also with what Dr. Johnson has called 'metaphysical 
distresses.'  It is striking enough to observe how differently the 
quiet monasteries of the Carthusian and Trappist brotherhoods 
affected Matthew Arnold and Robert Louis Stevenson.  In his well-
known elegiac stanzas Matthew Arnold likens his own state to that 
of the monks:


'Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these on earth I wait forlorn.
Their faith, my tears, the world deride -
I come to shed them at their side.'



To Stevenson, on the other hand, our Lady of the Snows is a 
mistaken divinity, and the place a monument of chilly error, - for 
once in a way he takes it on himself to be a preacher, his 
temperament gives voice in a creed:


'And ye, O brethren, what if God,
When from Heaven's top He spies abroad,
And sees on this tormented stage
The noble war of mankind rage,
What if His vivifying eye,
O monks, should pass your corner by?
For still the Lord is Lord of might;
In deeds, in deeds, He takes delight;
The plough, the spear, the laden barks,
The field, the founded city, marks;
He marks the smiler of the streets,
The singer upon garden seats;
He sees the climber in the rocks;
To Him, the shepherd folds his flocks;
For those He loves that underprop
With daily virtues Heaven's top,
And bear the falling sky with ease,
Unfrowning Caryatides.
Those He approves that ply the trade,
That rock the child, that wed the maid,
That with weak virtues, weaker hands,
Sow gladness on the peopled lands,
And still with laughter, song, and shout
Spin the great wheel of earth about.

But ye? - O ye who linger still
Here in your fortress on the hill,
With placid face, with tranquil breath,
The unsought volunteers of death,
Our cheerful General on high
With careless looks may pass you by!'


And the fact of death, which has damped and darkened the writings 
of so many minor poets, does not cast a pallor on his conviction.  
Life is of value only because it can be spent, or given; and the 
love of God coveted the position, and assumed mortality.  If a man 
treasure and hug his life, one thing only is certain, that he will 
be robbed some day, and cut the pitiable and futile figure of one 
who has been saving candle-ends in a house that is on fire.  Better 
than this to have a foolish spendthrift blaze and the loving cup 
going round.  Stevenson speaks almost with a personal envy of the 
conduct of the four marines of the WAGER.  There was no room for 
them in the boat, and they were left on a desert island to a 
certain death.  'They were soldiers, they said, and knew well 
enough it was their business to die; and as their comrades pulled 
away, they stood upon the beach, gave three cheers, and cried, "God 
bless the King!"  Now, one or two of those who were in the boat 
escaped, against all likelihood, to tell the story.  That was a 
great thing for us' - even when life is extorted it may be given 
nobly, with ceremony and courtesy.  So strong was Stevenson's 
admiration for heroic graces like these that in the requiem that 
appears in his poems he speaks of an ordinary death as of a hearty 
exploit, and draws his figures from lives of adventure and toil:


'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 THE SEA,
AND THE HUNTER HOME FROM THE HILL.'


This man should surely have been honoured with the pomp and colour 
and music of a soldier's funeral.

The most remarkable feature of the work he has left is its singular 
combination of style and romance.  It has so happened, and the 
accident has gained almost the strength of a tradition, that the 
most assiduous followers of romance have been careless stylists.  
They have trusted to the efficacy of their situation and incident, 
and have too often cared little about the manner of its 
presentation.  By an odd piece of irony style has been left to the 
cultivation of those who have little or nothing to tell.  Sir 
Walter Scott himself, with all his splendid romantic and tragic 
gifts, often, in Stevenson's perfectly just phrase, 'fobs us off 
with languid and inarticulate twaddle.'  He wrote carelessly and 
genially, and then breakfasted, and began the business of the day.  
But Stevenson, who had romance tingling in every vein of his body, 
set himself laboriously and patiently to train his other faculty, 
the faculty of style.


I.    STYLE. - Let no one say that 'reading and writing comes by 
nature,' unless he is prepared to be classed with the foolish 
burgess who said it first.  A poet is born, not made, - so is every 
man, - but he is born raw.  Stevenson's life was a grave devotion 
to the education of himself in the art of writing,


'The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne,
Thassay so hard, so sharp the conquering.'


Those who deny the necessity, or decry the utility, of such an 
education, are generally deficient in a sense of what makes good 
literature - they are 'word-deaf,' as others are colour-blind.  All 
writing is a kind of word-weaving; a skilful writer will make a 
splendid tissue out of the diverse fibres of words.  But to care 
for words, to select them judiciously and lovingly, is not in the 
least essential to all writing, all speaking; for the sad fact is 
this, that most of us do our thinking, our writing, and our 
speaking in phrases, not in words.  The work of a feeble writer is 
always a patchwork of phrases, some of them borrowed from the 
imperial texture of Shakespeare and Milton, others picked up from 
the rags in the street.  We make our very kettle-holders of pieces 
of a king's carpet.  How many overworn quotations from Shakespeare 
suddenly leap into meaning and brightness when they are seen in 
their context!  'The cry is still, "They come!" ' - 'More honoured 
in the breach than the observance,' - the sight of these phrases in 
the splendour of their dramatic context in MACBETH and HAMLET casts 
shame upon their daily degraded employments.  But the man of 
affairs has neither the time to fashion his speech, nor the 
knowledge to choose his words, so he borrows his sentences ready-
made, and applies them in rough haste to purposes that they do not 
exactly fit.  Such a man inevitably repeats, like the cuckoo, 
monotonous catchwords, and lays his eggs of thought in the material 
that has been woven into consistency by others.  It is a matter of 
natural taste, developed and strengthened by continual practice, to 
avoid being the unwitting slave of phrases.

The artist in words, on the other hand, although he is a lover of 
fine phrases, in his word-weaving experiments uses no shoddy, but 
cultivates his senses of touch and sight until he can combine the 
raw fibres in novel and bewitching patterns.  To this end he must 
have two things: a fine sense, in the first place, of the sound, 
value, meaning, and associations of individual words, and next, a 
sense of harmony, proportion, and effect in their combination.  It 
is amazing what nobility a mere truism is often found to possess 
when it is clad with a garment thus woven.

Stevenson had both these sensitive capabilities in a very high 
decree.  His careful choice of epithet and name have even been 
criticised as lending to some of his narrative-writing an excessive 
air of deliberation.  His daintiness of diction is best seen in his 
earlier work; thereafter his writing became more vigorous and 
direct, fitter for its later uses, but never unillumined by 
felicities that cause a thrill of pleasure to the reader.  Of the 
value of words he had the acutest appreciation.  VIRGINIBUS 
PUERISQUE, his first book of essays, is crowded with happy hits and 
subtle implications conveyed in a single word.  'We have all 
heard,' he says in one of these, 'of cities in South America built 
upon the side of fiery mountains, and how, even in this tremendous 
neighbourhood, the inhabitants are not a jot more impressed by the 
solemnity of mortal conditions than if they were delving gardens in 
the greenest corner of England.'  You can feel the ground shake and 
see the volcano tower above you at that word 'TREMENDOUS 
neighbourhood.'  Something of the same double reference to the 
original and acquired meanings of a word is to be found in such a 
phrase as 'sedate electrician,' for one who in a back office wields 
all the lights of a city; or in that description of one drawing 
near to death, who is spoken of as groping already with his hands 
'on the face of the IMPASSABLE.'

The likeness of this last word to a very different word, 
'IMPASSIVE,' is made to do good literary service in suggesting the 
sphinx-like image of death.  Sometimes, as here, this subtle sense 
of double meanings almost leads to punning.  In ACROSS THE PLAINS 
Stevenson narrates how a bet was transacted at a railway-station, 
and subsequently, he supposes, 'LIQUIDATED at the bar.'  This is 
perhaps an instance of the excess of a virtue, but it is an excess 
to be found plentifully in the works of Milton.

His loving regard for words bears good fruit in his later and more 
stirring works.  He has a quick ear and appreciation for live 
phrases on the lips of tramps, beach-combers, or Americans.  In THE 
BEACH OF FALESA the sea-captain who introduces the new trader to 
the South Pacific island where the scene of the story is laid, 
gives a brief description of the fate of the last dealer in copra.  
It may serve as a single illustration of volumes of racy, humorous, 
and imaginative slang;


' "Do you catch a bit of white there to the east'ard?" the captain 
continued.  "That's your house. . . . When old Adams saw it, he 
took and shook me by the hand.  'I've dropped into a soft thing 
here,' says he.  'So you have,' says I. . . . Poor Johnny!  I never 
saw him again but the once . . . and the next time we came round 
there he was dead and buried.  I took and put up a bit of stick to 
him: 'John Adams, OBIT eighteen and sixty-eight.  Go thou and do 
likewise.'  I missed that man.  I never could see much harm in 
Johnny."

' "What did he die of ?" I inquired.

' "Some kind of sickness," says the captain.  "It appears it took 
him sudden.  Seems he got up in the night, and filled up on Pain-
Killer and Kennedy's Discovery.  No go - he was booked beyond 
Kennedy.  Then he had tried to open a case of gin.  No go again: 
not strong enough. . . . Poor John!" '


There is a world of abrupt, homely talk like this to be found in 
the speech of Captain Nares and of Jim Pinkerton in THE WRECKER; 
and a wealth of Scottish dialect, similar in effect, in KIDNAPPED, 
CATRIONA, and many other stories.  It was a delicate ear and a 
sense trained by practice that picked up these vivid turns of 
speech, some of them perhaps heard only once, and a mind given to 
dwell on words, that remembered them for years, and brought them 
out when occasion arose.

But the praise of Stevenson's style cannot be exhausted in a 
description of his use of individual words or his memory of 
individual phrases.  His mastery of syntax, the orderly and 
emphatic arrangement of words in sentences, a branch of art so 
seldom mastered, was even greater.  And here he could owe no great 
debt to his romantic predecessors in prose.  Dumas, it is true, is 
a master of narrative, but he wrote in French, and a style will 
hardly bear expatriation.  Scott's sentences are, many of them, 
shambling, knock-kneed giants.  Stevenson harked further back for 
his models, and fed his style on the most vigorous of the prose 
writers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the 
golden age of English prose.  'What English those fellows wrote!' 
says Fitzgerald in one of his letters; 'I cannot read the modern 
mechanique after them.'  And he quotes a passage from Harrington's 
OCEANA:


'This free-born Nation lives not upon the dole or Bounty of One 
Man, but distributing her Annual Magistracies and Honours with her 
own hand, is herself King People.'


It was from writers of Harrington's time and later that Stevenson 
learned something of his craft.  Bunyan and Defoe should be 
particularly mentioned, and that later excellent worthy, Captain 
Charles Johnson, who compiled the ever-memorable LIVES OF PIRATES 
AND HIGHWAYMEN.  Mr. George Meredith is the chief of those very few 
modern writers whose influence may be detected in his style.

However it was made, and whencesoever the material or suggestion 
borrowed, he came by a very admirable instrument for the telling of 
stories.  Those touches of archaism that are so frequent with him, 
the slightly unusual phrasing, or unexpected inversion of the order 
of words, show a mind alert in its expression, and give the sting 
of novelty even to the commonplaces of narrative or conversation.  
A nimble literary tact will work its will on the phrases of current 
small-talk, remoulding them nearer to the heart's desire, 
transforming them to its own stamp.  This was what Stevenson did, 
and the very conversations that pass between his characters have an 
air of distinction that is all his own.  His books are full of 
brilliant talk - talk real and convincing enough in its purport and 
setting, but purged of the languors and fatuities of actual 
commonplace conversation.  It is an enjoyment like that to be 
obtained from a brilliant exhibition of fencing, clean and 
dexterous, to assist at the talking bouts of David Balfour and Miss 
Grant, Captain Nares and Mr. Dodd, Alexander Mackellar and the 
Master of Ballantrae, Prince Otto and Sir John Crabtree, or those 
wholly admirable pieces of special pleading to be found in A 
LODGING FOR THE NIGHT and THE SIRE DE MALETROIT'S DOOR.  But people 
do not talk like this in actual life- ' 'tis true, 'tis pity; and 
pity 'tis, 'tis true.'  They do not; in actual life conversation is 
generally so smeared and blurred with stupidities, so invaded and 
dominated by the spirit of dulness, so liable to swoon into 
meaninglessness, that to turn to Stevenson's books is like an 
escape into mountain air from the stagnant vapours of a morass.  
The exact reproduction of conversation as it occurs in life can 
only be undertaken by one whose natural dulness feels itself 
incommoded by wit and fancy as by a grit in the eye.  Conversation 
is often no more than a nervous habit of body, like twiddling the 
thumbs, and to record each particular remark is as much as to 
describe each particular twiddle.  Or in its more intellectual 
uses, when speech is employed, for instance, to conceal our 
thoughts, how often is it a world too wide for the shrunken nudity 
of the thought it is meant to veil, and thrown over it, formless, 
flabby, and black - like a tarpaulin!  It is pleasant to see 
thought and feeling dressed for once in the trim, bright raiment 
Stevenson devises for them.

There is an indescribable air of distinction, which is, and is not, 
one and the same thing with style, breathing from all his works.  
Even when he is least inspired, his bearing and gait could never be 
mistaken for another man's.  All that he writes is removed by the 
width of the spheres from the possibility of commonplace, and he 
avoids most of the snares and pitfalls of genius with noble and 
unconscious skill.

If he ever fell into one of these - which may perhaps be doubted - 
it was through too implicit a confidence in the powers of style.  
His open letter to the Rev.  Dr. Hyde in vindication of Father 
Damien is perhaps his only literary mistake.  It is a matchless 
piece of scorn and invective, not inferior in skill to anything he 
ever wrote.  But that it was well done is no proof that it should 
have been done at all.  'I remember Uzzah and am afraid,' said the 
wise Erasmus, when he was urged to undertake the defence of Holy 
Church; 'it is not every one who is permitted to support the Ark of 
the Covenant.'  And the only disquietude suggested by Stevenson's 
letter is a doubt whether he really has a claim to be Father 
Damien's defender, whether Father Damien had need of the assistance 
of a literary freelance.  The Saint who was bitten in the hand by a 
serpent shook it off into the fire and stood unharmed.  As it was 
in the Mediterranean so it was also in the Pacific, and there is 
something officious in the intrusion of a spectator, something 
irrelevant in the plentiful pronouns of the first person singular 
to be found sprinkled over Stevenson's letter.  The curse spoken in 
Eden, 'Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all 
the days of thy life,' surely covered by anticipation the case of 
the Rev. Dr. Hyde.


II.    ROMANCE. - The faculty of romance, the greatest of the gifts 
showered on Stevenson's cradle by the fairies, will suffer no 
course of development; the most that can be done with it is to 
preserve it on from childhood unblemished and undiminished.  It is 
of a piece with Stevenson's romantic ability that his own childhood 
never ended; he could pass back into that airy world without an 
effort.  In his stories his imagination worked on the old lines, 
but it became conscious of its working.  And the highest note of 
these stories is not drama, nor character, but romance.  In one of 
his essays he defines the highest achievement of romance to be the 
embodiment of 'character, thought, or emotion in some act or 
attitude that shall be remarkably striking to the mind's eye.'  His 
essay on Victor Hugo shows how keenly conscious he was that 
narrative romance can catch and embody emotions and effects that 
are for ever out of the reach of the drama proper, and of the essay 
or homily, just as they are out of the reach of sculpture and 
painting.  Now, it is precisely in these effects that the chief 
excellence of romance resides; it was the discovery of a world of 
these effects, insusceptible of treatment by the drama, neglected 
entirely by the character-novel, which constituted the Romantic 
revival of the end of last century.  'The artistic result of a 
romance,' says Stevenson, 'what is left upon the memory by any 
powerful and artistic novel, is something so complicated and 
refined that it is difficult to put a name upon it, and yet 
something as simple as nature. . . .  The fact is, that art is 
working far ahead of language as well as of science, realizing for 
us, by all manner of suggestions and exaggerations, effects for 
which as yet we have no direct name, for the reason that these 
effects do not enter very largely into the necessities of life.  
Hence alone is that suspicion of vagueness that often hangs about 
the purpose of a romance; it is clear enough to us in thought, but 
we are not used to consider anything clear until we are able to 
formulate it in words, and analytical language has not been 
sufficiently shaped to that end.'  He goes on to point out that 
there is an epical value about every great romance, an underlying 
idea, not presentable always in abstract or critical terms, in the 
stories of such masters of pure romance as Victor Hugo and 
Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The progress of romance in the present century has consisted 
chiefly in the discovery of new exercises of imagination and new 
subtle effects in story.  Fielding, as Stevenson says, did not 
understand that the nature of a landscape or the spirit of the 
times could count for anything in a story; all his actions consist 
of a few simple personal elements.  With Scott vague influences 
that qualify a man's personality begin to make a large claim; 'the 
individual characters begin to occupy a comparatively small 
proportion of that canvas on which armies manoeuvre and great hills 
pile themselves upon each other's shoulders.'  And the achievements 
of the great masters since Scott - Hugo, Dumas, Hawthorne, to name 
only those in Stevenson's direct line of ancestry - have added new 
realms to the domain of romance.

What are the indescribable effects that romance, casting far beyond 
problems of character and conduct, seeks to realise?  What is the 
nature of the great informing, underlying idea that animates a 
truly great romance - THE BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR, MONTE CRISTO, LES 
MISERABLES, THE SCARLET LETTER, THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE?  These 
questions can only be answered by de-forming the impression given 
by each of these works to present it in the chop-logic language of 
philosophy.  But an approach to an answer may be made by 
illustration.

In his AMERICAN NOTEBOOKS Nathaniel Hawthorne used to jot down 
subjects for stories as they struck him.  His successive entries 
are like the souls of stories awaiting embodiment, which many of 
them never received; they bring us very near to the workings of the 
mind of a great master.  Here are some of them:


'A sketch to be given of a modern reformer, a type of the extreme 
doctrines on the subject of slaves, cold water, and the like.  He 
goes about the streets haranguing most eloquently, and is on the 
point of making many converts, when his labours are suddenly 
interrupted by the appearance of the keeper of a madhouse whence he 
has escaped.  Much may be made of this idea.'

'The scene of a story or sketch to be laid within the light of a 
street lantern; the time when the lamp is near going out; and the 
catastrophe to be simultaneous with the last flickering gleam.'

'A person to be writing a tale and to find it shapes itself against 
his intentions; that the characters act otherwise than he thought, 
and a catastrophe comes which he strives in vain to avert.  It 
might shadow forth his own fate - he having made himself one of the 
personages.'

'Two persons to be expecting some occurrence and watching for the 
two principal actors in it, and to find that the occurrence is even 
then passing, and that they themselves are the two actors.'

'A satire on ambition and fame from a statue of snow.'


Hawthorne used this idea in one of his sketches.


'A moral philosopher to buy a slave, or otherwise get possession of 
a human being, and to use him for the sake of experiment by trying 
the operation of a certain vice on him.'


M. Bourget, the French romancer, has made use of this idea in his 
novel called LE DISCIPLE.  Only it is not a slave, but a young girl 
whom he pretends to love, that is the subject of the moral 
philosopher's experiment; and a noisy war has been waged round the 
book in France.  Hawthorne would plainly have seized the romantic 
essence of the idea and would have avoided the boneyard of 'problem 
morality.'


'A story the principal personage of which shall seem always on the 
point of entering on the scene, but shall never appear.'


This is the device that gives fascination to the figures of 
Richelieu in MARION DELORME, and of Captain Flint in TREASURE 
ISLAND.


'The majesty of death to be exemplified in a beggar, who, after 
being seen humble and cringing in the streets of a city for many 
years, at length by some means or other gets admittance into a rich 
man's mansion, and there dies - assuming state, and striking awe 
into the breasts of those who had looked down upon him.'


These are all excellent instances of the sort of idea that gives 
life to a romance - of acts or attitudes that stamp themselves upon 
the mind's eye.  Some of them appeal chiefly to the mind's eye, 
others are of value chiefly as symbols.  But, for the most part, 
the romantic kernel of a story is neither pure picture nor pure 
allegory, it can neither be painted nor moralised.  It makes its 
most irresistible appeal neither to the eye that searches for form 
and colour, nor to the reason that seeks for abstract truth, but to 
the blood, to all that dim instinct of danger, mystery, and 
sympathy in things that is man's oldest inheritance - to the 
superstitions of the heart.  Romance vindicates the supernatural 
against science and rescues it from the palsied tutelage of 
morality.

Stevenson's work is a gallery of romantic effects that haunt the 
memory.  Some of these are directly pictorial: the fight in the 
round-house on board the brig COVENANT; the duel between the two 
brothers of Ballantrae in the island of light thrown up by the 
candles from that abyss of windless night; the flight of the 
Princess Seraphina through the dark mazes of the wood, - all these, 
although they carry with them subtleties beyond the painter's art, 
yet have something of picture in them.  But others make entrance to 
the corridors of the mind by blind and secret ways, and there 
awaken the echoes of primaeval fear.  The cry of the parrot - 
'Pieces of eight' - the tapping of the stick of the blind pirate 
Pew as he draws near the inn-parlour, and the similar effects of 
inexplicable terror wrought by the introduction of the blind 
catechist in KIDNAPPED, and of the disguise of a blind leper in THE 
BLACK ARROW, are beyond the reach of any but the literary form of 
romantic art.  The last appearance of Pew, in the play of ADMIRAL 
GUINEA, written in collaboration with Mr. W. E. Henley, is perhaps 
the masterpiece of all the scenes of terror.  The blind ruffian's 
scream of panic fear, when he puts his groping hand into the 
burning flame of the candle in the room where he believed that he 
was unseen, and so realises that his every movement is being 
silently watched, is indeed 'the horrors come alive.'

The animating principle or idea of Stevenson's longer stories is 
never to be found in their plot, which is generally built 
carelessly and disjointedly enough around the central romantic 
situation or conception.  The main situation in THE WRECKER is a 
splendid product of romantic aspiration, but the structure of the 
story is incoherent and ineffective, so that some of the best 
passages in the book - the scenes in Paris, for instance - have no 
business there at all.  The story in KIDNAPPED and CATRIONA wanders 
on in a single thread, like the pageant of a dream, and the reader 
feels and sympathises with the author's obvious difficulty in 
leading it back to the scene of the trial and execution of James 
Stewart.  THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE is stamped with a magnificent 
unity of conception, but the story illuminates that conception by a 
series of scattered episodes.

That lurid embodiment of fascinating evil, part vampire, part 
Mephistopheles, whose grand manner and heroic abilities might have 
made him a great and good man but for 'the malady of not wanting,' 
is the light and meaning of the whole book.  Innocent and 
benevolent lives are thrown in his way that he may mock or distort 
or shatter them.  Stevenson never came nearer than in this 
character to the sublime of power.

But an informing principle of unity is more readily to be 
apprehended in the shorter stories, and it is a unity not so much 
of plot as of impression and atmosphere.  His islands, whether 
situated in the Pacific or off the coast of Scotland, have each of 
them a climate of its own, and the character of the place seems to 
impose itself on the incidents that occur, dictating subordination 
or contrast.  The events that happen within the limits of one of 
these magic isles could in every case be cut off from the rest of 
the story and framed as a separate work of art.  The long 
starvation of David Balfour on the island of Earraid, the sharks of 
crime and monsters of blasphemy that break the peace of the shining 
tropical lagoons in TREASURE ISLAND and THE EBB TIDE, the captivity 
on the Bass Rock in CATRIONA, the supernatural terrors that hover 
and mutter over the island of THE MERRY MEN - these imaginations 
are plainly generated by the scenery against which they are thrown; 
each is in some sort the genius of the place it inhabits.

In his search for the treasures of romance, Stevenson adventured 
freely enough into the realm of the supernatural.

When he is handling the superstitions of the Scottish people, he 
allows his humorous enjoyment of their extravagance to peep out 
from behind the solemn dialect in which they are dressed.  The 
brief tale of THRAWN JANET, and Black Andy's story of Tod Lapraik 
in CATRIONA, are grotesque imaginations of the school of TAM O' 
SHANTER rather than of the school of Shakespeare, who deals in no 
comedy ghosts.  They are turnip-lanterns swayed by a laughing 
urchin, proud of the fears he can awaken.  Even THE STRANGE CASE OF 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE and the story of THE BOTTLE IMP are 
manufactured bogeys, that work on the nerves and not on the heart, 
whatever may be said by those who insist on seeing allegory in what 
is only dream-fantasy.  The supernatural must be rooted deeper than 
these in life and experience if it is to reach an imposing stature: 
the true ghost is the shadow of a man.  And Stevenson shows a sense 
of this in two of his very finest stories, the exquisite idyll of 
WILL O' THE MILL and the grim history of MARKHEIM.  Each of these 
stories is the work of a poet, by no means of a goblin-fancier.  
The personification of Death is as old as poetry; it is wrought 
with moving gentleness in that last scene in the arbour of Will's 
inn.  The wafted scent of the heliotropes, which had never been 
planted in the garden since Marjory's death, the light in the room 
that had been hers, prelude the arrival at the gate of the 
stranger's carriage, with the black pine tops standing above it 
like plumes.  And Will o' the Mill makes the acquaintance of his 
physician and friend, and goes at last upon his travels.  In the 
other story, Markheim meets with his own double in the house of the 
dealer in curiosities, whom he has murdered.  It is not such a 
double as Rossetti prayed for to the god of Sleep:


'Ah! might I, by thy good grace,
Groping in the windy stair
(Darkness and the breath of space
Like loud waters everywhere),
Meeting mine own image there
Face to face,
Send it from that place to her!'


but a clear-eyed critic of the murderer, not unfriendly, who lays 
bare before him his motives and history.  At the close of that 
wonderful conversation, one of the most brilliant of its author's 
achievements, Markheim gives himself into the hands of the police.  
These two stories, when compared with the others, serve to show how 
Stevenson's imagination quickened and strengthened when it played 
full upon life.  For his best romantic effects, like all great 
romance, are illuminative of life, and no mere idle games.


III.    MORALITY. - His genius, like the genius of Nathaniel 
Hawthorne, was doubly rich in the spirit of romance and in a wise 
and beautiful morality.  But the irresponsible caprices of his 
narrative fancy prevented his tales from being the appropriate 
vehicles of his morality.  He has left no work - unless the two 
short stories mentioned above be regarded as exceptions - in which 
romance and morality are welded into a single perfect whole, 
nothing that can be put beside THE SCARLET LETTER or THE MARBLE 
FAUN for deep insight and magic fancy joined in one.  Hence his 
essays, containing as they do the gist of his reflective wisdom, 
are ranked by some critics above his stories.

A novel cannot, of course, be moral as an action is moral; there is 
no question in art of police regulations or conformity to 
established codes, but rather of insight both deep and wide.  
Polygamy and monogamy, suttee, thuggism, and cannibalism, are all 
acceptable to the romancer, whose business is with the heart of a 
man in all times and places.  He is not bound to display allegiance 
to particular moral laws of the kind that can be broken; he is 
bound to show his consciousness of that wider moral order which can 
no more be broken by crime than the law of gravitation can be 
broken by the fall of china - the morality without which life would 
be impossible; the relations, namely, of human beings to each 
other, the feelings, habits, and thoughts that are the web of 
society.  For the appreciation of morality in this wider sense high 
gifts of imagination are necessary.  Shakespeare could never have 
drawn Macbeth, and thereby made apparent the awfulness of murder, 
without some sympathy for the murderer - the sympathy of 
intelligence.  These gifts of imagination and sympathy belong to 
Stevenson in a very high degree; in all his romances there are 
gleams from time to time of wise and subtle reflection upon life, 
from the eternal side of things, which shine the more luminously 
that they spring from the events and situations with no suspicion 
of homily.  In THE BLACK ARROW, Dick Shelton begs from the Duke of 
Gloucester the life of the old shipmaster Arblaster, whose ship he 
had taken and accidentally wrecked earlier in the story.  The Duke 
of Gloucester, who, in his own words, 'loves not mercy nor mercy-
mongers,' yields the favour reluctantly.  Then Dick turns to 
Arblaster.


' "Come," said Dick, "a life is a life, old shrew, and it is more 
than ships or liquor.  Say you forgive me, for if your life is 
worth nothing to you, it hath cost me the beginnings of my fortune.  
Come, I have paid for it dearly, be not so churlish."

' "An I had my ship," said Arblaster, "I would 'a' been forth and 
safe on the high seas - I and my man Tom.  But ye took my ship, 
gossip, and I'm a beggar; and for my man Tom, a knave fellow in 
russet shot him down, 'Murrain,' quoth he, and spake never again.  
'Murrain' was the last of his words, and the poor spirit of him 
passed.  'A will never sail no more, will my Tom."

'Dick was seized with unavailing penitence and pity; he sought to 
take the skipper's hand, but Arblaster avoided his touch.

' "Nay," said he, "let be.  Y' have played the devil with me, and 
let that content you."

'The words died in Richard's throat.  He saw, through tears, the 
poor old man, bemused with liquor and sorrow, go shambling away, 
with bowed head, across the snow, and the unnoticed dog whimpering 
at his heels; and for the first time began to understand the 
desperate game that we play in life, and how a thing once done is 
not to be changed or remedied by any penitence.'


A similar wisdom that goes to the heart of things is found on the 
lips of the spiritual visitant in Markheim.


' "Murder is to me no special category," replied the other.  "All 
sins are murder, even as all life is war.  I behold your race, like 
starving mariners on a raft, plucking crusts out of the hands of 
famine, and feeding on each other's lives.  I follow sins beyond 
the moment of their acting; I find in all that the last consequence 
is death; and to my eyes the pretty maid, who thwarts her mother 
with such taking graces on a question of a ball, drips no less 
visibly with human gore than such a murderer as yourself." '


The wide outlook on humanity that expresses itself in passages like 
these is combined in Stevenson with a vivid interest in, and quick 
appreciation of, character.  The variety of the characters that he 
has essayed to draw is enormous, and his successes, for the 
purposes of his stories, are many.  Yet with all this, the number 
of lifelike portraits, true to a hair, that are to be found in his 
works is very small indeed.  In the golden glow of romance, 
character is always subject to be idealised; it is the effect of 
character seen at particular angles and in special lights, natural 
or artificial, that Stevenson paints; he does not attempt to 
analyse the complexity of its elements, but boldly projects into it 
certain principles, and works from those.  It has often been said 
of Scott that he could not draw a lady who was young and beautiful; 
the glamour of chivalry blinded him, he lowered his eyes and 
described his emotions and aspirations.  Something of the same 
disability afflicted Stevenson in the presence of a ruffian.  He 
loved heroic vice only less than he loved heroic virtue, and was 
always ready to idealise his villains, to make of them men who, 
like the Master of Ballantrae, 'lived for an idea.'  Even the low 
and lesser villainy of Israel Hands, in the great scene where he 
climbs the mast to murder the hero of TREASURE ISLAND, breathes out 
its soul in a creed:


' "For thirty years," he said, "I've sailed the seas, and seen good 
and bad, better and worse, provisions running out, knives going, 
and what not.  Well, now I tell you, I never seen good come o' 
goodness yet.  Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don't 
bite; them's my views - Amen, so be it." '


John Silver, that memorable pirate, with a face like a ham and an 
eye like a fragment of glass stuck into it, leads a career of 
wholehearted crime that can only be described as sparkling.  His 
unalloyed maleficence is adorned with a thousand graces of manner.  
Into the dark and fetid marsh that is an evil heart, where low 
forms of sentiency are hardly distinguishable from the all-
pervading mud, Stevenson never peered, unless it were in the study 
of Huish in THE EBB TIDE.

Of his women, let women speak.  They are traditionally accredited 
with an intuition of one another's hearts, although why, if woman 
was created for man, as the Scriptures assure us, the impression 
that she makes on him should not count for as much as the 
impression she makes on some other woman, is a question that cries 
for solution.  Perhaps the answer is that disinterested curiosity, 
which is one means of approach to the knowledge of character, 
although only one, is a rare attitude for man to assume towards the 
other sex.  Stevenson's curiosity was late in awaking; the heroine 
of THE BLACK ARROW is dressed in boy's clothes throughout the 
course of the story, and the novelist thus saved the trouble of 
describing the demeanour of a girl.  Mrs. Henry, in THE MASTER OF 
BALLANTRAE, is a charming veiled figure, drawn in the shadow; Miss 
Barbara Grant and Catriona in the continuation of KIDNAPPED are 
real enough to have made many suitors for their respective hands 
among male readers of the book; - but that is nothing, reply the 
critics of the other party: a walking doll will find suitors.  The 
question must stand over until some definite principles of 
criticism have been discovered to guide us among these perilous 
passes.

One character must never be passed over in an estimate of 
Stevenson's work.  The hero of his longest work is not David 
Balfour, in whom the pawky Lowland lad, proud and precise, but 'a 
very pretty gentleman,' is transfigured at times by traits that he 
catches, as narrator of the story, from its author himself.  But 
Alan Breek Stewart is a greater creation, and a fine instance of 
that wider morality that can seize by sympathy the soul of a wild 
Highland clansman.  'Impetuous, insolent, unquenchable,' a condoner 
of murder (for 'them that havenae dipped their hands in any little 
difficulty should be very mindful of the case of them that have'), 
a confirmed gambler, as quarrel-some as a turkey-cock, and as vain 
and sensitive as a child, Alan Breek is one of the most lovable 
characters in all literature; and his penetration - a great part of 
which he learned, to take his own account of it, by driving cattle 
'through a throng lowland country with the black soldiers at his 
tail' - blossoms into the most delightful reflections upon men and 
things.

The highest ambitions of a novelist are not easily attainable.  To 
combine incident, character, and romance in a uniform whole, to 
alternate telling dramatic situation with effects of poetry and 
suggestion, to breathe into the entire conception a profound 
wisdom, construct it with absolute unity, and express it in perfect 
style, - this thing has never yet been done.  A great part of 
Stevenson's subtle wisdom of life finds its readiest outlet in his 
essays.  In these, whatever their occasion, he shows himself the 
clearest-eyed critic of human life, never the dupe of the phrases 
and pretences, the theories and conventions, that distort the 
vision of most writers and thinkers.  He has an unerring instinct 
for realities, and brushes aside all else with rapid grace.  In his 
lately published AMATEUR EMIGRANT he describes one of his fellow-
passengers to America:


'In truth it was not whisky that had ruined him; he was ruined long 
before for all good human purposes but conversation.  His eyes were 
sealed by a cheap school-book materialism.  He could see nothing in 
the world but money and steam engines.  He did not know what you 
meant by the word happiness.  He had forgotten the simple emotions 
of childhood, and perhaps never encountered the delights of youth.  
He believed in production, that useful figment of economy, as if it 
had been real, like laughter; and production, without prejudice to 
liquor, was his god and guide.'


This sense of the realities of the world, - laughter, happiness, 
the simple emotions of childhood, and others, - makes Stevenson an 
admirable critic of those social pretences that ape the native 
qualities of the heart.  The criticism on organised philanthropy 
contained in the essay on BEGGARS is not exhaustive, it is 
expressed paradoxically, but is it untrue?


'We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: gratitude and 
charity.  In real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is 
not valued; it is received from the hand of friendship, or it is 
resented.  We are all too proud to take a naked gift; we must seem 
to pay it, if in nothing else, then with the delights of our 
society.  Here, then, is the pitiful fix of the rich man; here is 
that needle's eye in which he stuck already in the days of Christ, 
and still sticks to-day, firmer, if possible, than ever; that he 
has the money, and lacks the love which should make his money 
acceptable.  Here and now, just as of old in Palestine, he has the 
rich to dinner, it is with the rich that he takes his pleasure: and 
when his turn comes to be charitable, he looks in vain for a 
recipient.  His friends are not poor, they do not want; the poor 
are not his friends, they will not take.  To whom is he to give?  
Where to find - note this phrase - the Deserving Poor?  Charity is 
(what they call) centralised; offices are hired; societies founded, 
with secretaries paid or unpaid: the hunt of the Deserving Poor 
goes merrily forward.  I think it will take a more than merely 
human secretary to disinter that character.  What! a class that is 
to be in want from no fault of its own, and yet greedily eager to 
receive from strangers; and to be quite respectable, and at the 
same time quite devoid of self-respect; and play the most delicate 
part of friendship, and yet never be seen; and wear the form of 
man, and yet fly in the face of all the laws of human nature: - and 
all this, in the hope of getting a belly-god burgess through a 
needle's eye!  Oh, let him stick, by all means; and let his polity 
tumble in the dust; and let his epitaph and all his literature (of 
which my own works begin to form no inconsiderable part) be 
abolished even from the history of man!  For a fool of this 
monstrosity of dulness there can be no salvation; and the fool who 
looked for the elixir of life was an angel of reason to the fool 
who looks for the Deserving Poor.'


An equal sense of the realities of life and death gives the force 
of a natural law to the pathos of OLD MORTALITY, that essay in 
which Stevenson pays passionate tribute to the memory of his early 
friend, who 'had gone to ruin with a kingly abandon, like one who 
condescended; but once ruined, with the lights all out, he fought 
as for a kingdom.'  The whole description, down to the marvellous 
quotation from Bunyan that closes it, is one of the sovereign 
passages of modern literature; the pathos of it is pure and 
elemental, like the rush of a cleansing wind, or the onset of the 
legions commanded by


'The mighty Mahmud, Allah-breathing Lord,
That all the misbelieving and black Horde
Of Fears and Sorrows that infest the Soul
Scatters before him with his whirlwind Sword.'


Lastly, to bring to an end this imperfect review of the works of a 
writer who has left none greater behind him, Stevenson excels at 
what is perhaps the most delicate of literary tasks and the utmost 
test, where it is successfully encountered, of nobility, - the 
practice, namely, of self-revelation and self-delineation.  To talk 
much about oneself with detail, composure, and ease, with no shadow 
of hypocrisy and no whiff or taint of indecent familiarity, no 
puling and no posing, - the shores of the sea of literature are 
strewn with the wrecks and forlorn properties of those who have 
adventured on this dangerous attempt.  But a criticism of Stevenson 
is happy in this, that from the writer it can pass with perfect 
trust and perfect fluency to the man.  He shares with Goldsmith and 
Montaigne, his own favourite, the happy privilege of making lovers 
among his readers.  'To be the most beloved of English writers - 
what a title that is for a man!' says Thackeray of Goldsmith.  In 
such matters, a dispute for pre-eminence in the captivation of 
hearts would be unseemly; it is enough to say that Stevenson too 
has his lovers among those who have accompanied him on his INLAND 
VOYAGE, or through the fastnesses of the Cevennes in the wake of 
Modestine.  He is loved by those that never saw his face; and one 
who has sealed that dizzy height of ambition may well be content, 
without the impertinent assurance that, when the Japanese have 
taken London and revised the contents of the British Museum, the 
yellow scribes whom they shall set to produce a new edition of the 
BIOGRAPHIE UNIVERSELLE will include in their entries the following 
item: - 'STEVENSON, R. L.  A PROLIFIC WRITER OF STORIES AMONG THE 
ABORIGINES.  FLOURISHED BEFORE THE COMING OF THE JAPANESE. HIS 
WORKS ARE LOST.'