Born, in Edinburgh, 13 Nov. 1850. Educated at Private schools, and at Edinburgh University. Originally intended for profession of Engineer. Gave it up, and studied Law; was called to Scottish Bar. Owing to ill-health, did not practise. Travelled on Continent, and in America. Married Mrs. Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, 1880. Settled in Samoa, Oct. 1880. Died there, 8 Dec. 1894. Buried there. Works: “The Pentland Rising” (anon.), 1866; “The Charity Bazaar” (anon.) [1868]; “An “Inland Voyage,” 1878; “Edinburgh,” 1879 [1878]; “Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes,” 1879; “Virginibus Puerisque,” 1881; “Not I, and other poems” (priv. ptd.), 1881; “Familiar Studies of Men and Books,” 1882; “New Arabian Nights,” 1882; “Treasure Island,” 1883; “The Silverado Squatters,” 1883; “A Child’s Garden of Verses,” 1885 (2nd edn. same year); “Prince Otto,” 1885; “The Dynamiter” (with his wife), 1885; “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” 1886; “Kidnapped,” 1886; “Ticonderoga” (priv. ptd.), 1887; “The Merry Men,” 1887; “Underwood’s,” 1887; “Memories and Portraits,” 1887; “The Black Arrow,” 1888; “The Wrong Box” (with L. Osbourne), 1889; “The Master of Ballantrae,” 1889; “Ballads,” 1890; “Father Damien,” 1890; “The Wrecker” (with L. Osbourne) [1892]; “Three Plays” (with W. E. Henley), 1892; “Across the Plains,” 1892; “A Footnote to History,” 1892; “Catriona,” 1893; “Island Nights’ Entertainment,” 1893; “The Ebb-Tide” (with L. Osbourne), 1894; “Macaire” (with W. E. Henley), 1895. Posthumous: “Vailima Letters,” ed. by Sidney Colvin, 1895; “Songs of Travel, and other verses,” ed. by Sidney Colvin, 1896; “Weir of Hermiston,” ed. by Sidney Colvin, 1896; “St. Ives” (unfinished; completed by A. T. Quiller-Couch), 1897. Collected Works: ed. by Sidney Colvin, 1894, etc.

Personal

  I have been writing to Louis’s dictation the story of “Anne de St. Ives,” a young Frenchman in the time of Napoleon. Some days we have worked from eight o’clock until four, and that is not counting the hours Louis writes and makes notes in the early morning by lamplight. He dictates with great earnestness, and when particularly interested unconsciously acts the part of his characters. When he came to the description of the supper Anne has with Flora and Ronald, he bowed as he dictated the hero’s speeches and twirled his mustache. When he described the interview between the old lady and the drover, he spoke in a high voice for the one, and a deep growl for the other, and all in broad Scotch even to “cōma” (comma). When Louis was writing “Ballantrae” my mother says he once came into her room to look in the glass, as he wished to describe a certain haughty, disagreeable expression of his hero’s. He told her he actually expected to see the master’s clean-shaven face and powdered head, and was quite disconcerted at beholding only his own reflection.

  Our children and grandchildren shall rejoice in his books; but we of this generation possessed in the living man something that they will not know. So long as he lived, though it were far from Britain—though we had never spoken to him and he, perhaps, had barely heard our names—we always wrote our best for Stevenson. To him each writer amongst us—small or more than small—had been proud to have carried his best. That best might be poor enough. So long as it was not slipshod, Stevenson could forgive. While he lived, he moved men to put their utmost even into writings that quite certainly would never meet his eye. Surely another age will wonder over this curiosity of letters—that for five years the needle of literary endeavour in Great Britain has quivered towards a little island in the South Pacific, as to its magnetic pole.

  Stevenson’s early school days do not bulk largely in the “Memories.” In fact he was not much at school. His father had a terror of education (so called), and often plumed himself on having been the author of Louis’ success in life, by keeping him as much as possible from pedagogic influence. That the paternal efforts met with filial support, Stevenson’s own confession assures us. “All through my boyhood and youth,” he writes, “I was known and pointed out for the pattern of an idler;” and this was highly probable, for his industry was by no means the sort to be recognised in scholastic high places. He was a day pupil first at Henderson’s, Inverleith Row, and then, for a year, at the Edinburgh Academy. While at the latter he edited a MS school magazine, called the “Sunbeam.” A water-color sketch by him in connection with this is still extant…. But, ere long, memory is busy again with the old haunts. Edinburgh University, in all innocence, inscribes a new classic on her roll. In the self-likeness he has left us of this period, he is a “lean, ugly, idle, unpopular student.” He takes care here, too, that his education shall not be interfered with, by acting upon “an extensive and highly rational system of truancy.” In the intervals, however, of his serious work—scribbling in penny version books, noting down features and scenes, and commemorating halting stanzas—his professors get some of his attention. But even then it is more as men than teachers. He could have written much better papers on themselves than on their subjects. Indeed he has done so.

  We first knew Louis Stevenson when his schooldays and teens were past, and he was facing what he called “the equinoctial gales of youth,” and beginning to put his self-taught art of writing into print…. He would frequently drop in to dinner with us, and of an evening he had the run of our smoking-room. After 10 P. M., when a stern old servant went to bed, the “open sesame” to our door was a rattle on the letter-box. He liked this admittance by secret sign, and we liked to hear his special rat-a-tat, for we knew we would then enjoy an hour or two of talk which, he said, “is the harmonious speech of two or more, and is by far the most accessible of pleasures.” He always adhered to the same dress for all entertainments, a shabby, short, velveteen jacket, a loose, Byronic, collared shirt (for a brief space he adopted black flannel ones), and meagre, shabby-looking trousers. His straight hair he wore long, and he looked like an unsuccessful artist, or a poorly-clad but eager student. He was then fragile in figure and, to use a Scottish expression, shilpit looking. There is no English equivalent for shilpit, being lean, starving, ill-thriven, in one. His dark, bright eyes were his most noticeable and attractive feature;—wide apart, almost Japanese in their shape, and above them a fine brow. He was pale and sallow, and there was a foreign, almost gipsy look about him, despite his long-headed Scotch ancestry.

  Perhaps no one was ever quicker to make deep friends when the true metal was found, or surer to grapple them “with hooks of steel.” A witty, ever-ready talker, a charmingly responsive listener, he was the best of company, even when he was in his bed-prison. His eager vivacity seemed to show no abatement save in the total eclipses of health.

  Mr. Stevenson, when I first saw him in his room in the Occidental Hotel in San Francisco, was sitting up in bed, not rightly able to speak for the cold that oppressed him, haggard from the illness that was sapping him, thin, pale, and wan. The first sight was something more than of a man with the blankets and counterpanes hunched up about him; it was an impression of flowing black hair, keen eyes, and a wonderful interlacing of taper fingers. At this time he was so hoarse that his voice had none of the charm which was really one of the most marked attributes of the man. More pleasant days, and strength growing in the nervous hope that the South Sea might indeed yield him what was nowhere else for him on earth, gave chances to hear that voice as it really was—gentle, deep, sympathetic. But those fingers—long, sinewy, sinuous, never resting, but rubbing each the other as if there was a mania of the nerves in their tips.

  It has often been asked what gave Mr. Stevenson his standing in Samoa; what it was that made this English man of letters such a power in the land of his adoption. It must be remembered that to the Samoan mind he was inordinately rich, and many of them believe in the bottom of their hearts that the story of the bottle-imp was no fiction, but a tangible fact. Mr. Stevenson was a resident, a considerable land-owner, a man like themselves, with taro-swamps, banana plantations, and a Samoan “aiga” or family. He was no official with a hired house, here to-day with specious good-will on his lips, and empty promises, but off to-morrow in the mail steamer to that vague region called “papa lagi” “or the white country.” He knew Samoan etiquette, and was familiar with the baser as well as the better side of the native character; he was cautiously generous after the fashion of the country, and neither excited covetousness by undue prodigality nor failed to respond in a befitting way for favors received.

  I came home dazzled with my new friend, saying as Constance does of Arthur, “Was ever such a gracious creature born?” That impression of ineffable mental charm was formed at the first moment of acquaintance, [about 1877] and it never lessened or became modified. Stevenson’s rapidity in the sympathetic interchange of ideas was, doubtless, the source of it. He has been described as an “egotist” but I challenge the description. If ever there was an altruist, it was Louis Stevenson; he seemed to feign an interest in himself merely to stimulate you to be liberal in your confidences. Those who have written about him from later impressions than these of which I speak seem to me to give insufficient prominence to the gaiety of Stevenson. It was his cardinal quality in those early days. A childlike mirth leaped and danced in him; he seemed to skip the hills of life. He was simply bubbling with quips and jests; his inherent earnestness or passion about abstract things was incessantly relieved by jocosity; and when he had built one of his intellectual castles in the sand, a wave of humor was certain to sweep in and destroy it. I cannot, for the life of me, recall any of his jokes; and written down in cold blood, they might not be funny if I did. They were not wit so much as humanity, the many-sided outlook upon life. I am anxious that his laughter-loving mood should not be forgotten, because later on it was partly, but I think never wholly, quenched by ill health, responsibility, and the advance of years. He was often, in the old days, excessively and delightfully silly—silly with the silliness of an inspired school-boy; and I am afraid that our laughter sometimes sounded ill in the ears of age.

  I never had heard of his existence till, in 1873, I think, I was at Mentone, in the interests of my health. Here I met Mr. Sidney Colvin, now of the British Museum, and, with Mr. Colvin, Stevenson. He looked as, in my eyes, he always did look, more like a lass than a lad, with a rather long, smooth oval face, brown hair worn at greater length than is common, large lucid eyes, but whether blue or brown I cannot remember, if brown, certainly light brown. On appealing to the authority of a lady, I learn that brown was the hue. His color was a trifle hectic, as is not unusual at Mentone, but he seemed, under his big blue cloak, to be of slender, yet agile frame. He was like nobody else whom I ever met. There was a sort of uncommon celerity in changing expression, in thought and speech. I shall not deny that my first impression was not wholly favorable. “Here,” I thought, “is one of your æsthetic young men, though a very clever one.” What the talk was about I do not remember; probably of books. Mr. Stevenson afterwards told me that I had spoken of Monsieur Paul de St. Victor, as a fine writer, but added that “he was not a British sportsman.” Mr. Stevenson himself, to my surprise, was unable to walk beyond a very short distance, and, as it soon appeared, he thought his thread of life was nearly spun. He had just written his essay, “Ordered South,” the first of his published works, for his “Pentland Rising” pamphlet was unknown, a boy’s performance. On reading “Ordered South,” I saw, at once, that here was a new writer, a writer indeed; one who could do what none of us, nous autres, could rival, or approach. I was instantly “sealed of the Tribe of Louis,” an admirer, a devotee, a fanatic, if you please…. I have known no man in whom the pre-eminently manly virtues of kindness, courage, sympathy, generosity, helpfulness, were more beautifully conspicuous than in Mr. Stevenson, none so much loved—it is not too strong a word—by so many and such various people. He was as unique in character as in literary genius.

  No man could have a more definite personality than Louis Stevenson’s; none could more surely awaken immediate interest or exert a more instant charm, or could seem more convincingly to guarantee that the charm and interest would perennially flourish and increase. There is one kind of success which Stevenson rarely can have known—the slow subdual of indifference; and one kind of disappointment which he seldom can have felt—the pause of the foot of friendliness on the threshold of love…. I find myself repeating the one word “eager.” There is none which better befits Stevenson’s appearance and manner and talk. His mind seemed to quiver with perpetual hope of something that would give it a new idea to feed upon, a new fact to file away, a new experience to be tested and savored. I could read this attitude even in the quick cordiality of his greeting. The welcome was not for me, as myself, but for the new person—for the new human being, who, possessing ears and a tongue, might possibly contribute some item to the harvest of the day.

  Life for those who remained in the Samoan home became an impossible thing without him, and so Mrs. Stevenson, with her son and daughter, by-and-bye left Vailima, and the home of so much happiness is now falling into ruin, the cleared ground lapsing back to the bush. And perhaps it is best so; without him Vailima is like a body without a soul; and he who so dearly loved nature would hardly have regretted that the place he loved should return to the mother heart of the earth and become once more a solitude—a green place of birds and trees.

  Stevenson calls himself “ugly” in his student days, but I think that is a term that never at any time fitted him. Certainly to him as a boy about fourteen (with the creed which he propounded to me, that at sixteen one was a man) it would not apply. In body Stevenson was assuredly badly set up. His limbs were long and lean and spidery, and his chest flat, so as almost to suggest some malnutrition, such sharp angles and corners did his joints make under his clothes. But in his face this was belied. His brow was oval and full, over soft brown eyes, that seemed already to have drunk the sunlight under southern vines. The whole face had a tendency to an oval Madonna-like type. But about the mouth and in the mirthful, mocking light of the eyes, there lingered ever a ready Autolycus roguery, that rather suggested the sly god Hermes masquerading as a mortal. Yet the eyes were always genial, however gaily the lights danced in them; but about the mouth there was something tricksy and mocking, as of a spirit that had already peeped behind the scenes of Life’s pageant and more than guessed its unrealities.

  For me there were two Stevensons; the Stevenson who went to America in ’87; and the Stevenson who never came back. The first I knew, and loved; the other I lost touch with, and, though I admired him, did not greatly esteem. My relation to him was that of a man with a grievance; and for that reason, perhaps—that reason and others—I am by no means disposed to take all Mr. Balfour says for Gospel, nor willing to forget, on the showing of what is after all an official statement, the knowledge gained in an absolute intimacy of give-and-take which lasted for thirteen years, and includes so many of the circumstances of those thirteen years, that, as I believe, none living now can pretend to speak of them with any such authority as mine…. Mr. Balfour does me the honour of quoting the sonnet into which I crammed my impressions of my companion and friend; and, since he has done so, I may as well own that “the Shorter Catechist” of the last verse was an afterthought. In those days he was in abeyance, to say the least; and if, even then, il allait poindre à l’horizon (as the composition, in secret and as if ashamed, of “Lay Morals” persuades me to believe he did), I, at any rate, was too short-sighted to suspect his whereabouts. When I realized it, I completed my sonnet; but this was not till years had come and gone, and the Shorter Catechist, already detested by more than one, was fully revealed to me. I will say at once that I do not love the Shorter Catechist, in anybody, and that I loved him less in Stevenson than anywhere that I have ever found him…. 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…. In print Stevenson was now and then witty enough for seven; but in talk his way was, not Congreve’s but, Harry Fielding’s. No; he was certainly not a wit, in the sense that Congreve was a wit.

  Considering his fragility, his muscular strength was considerable, and his constitution clearly had great powers of resistance. Perhaps what helped him as much as anything was the faculty he had under ordinary circumstances of going to sleep at a moment’s notice. Thus, if he anticipated fatigue in the evening, he would take a quarter of an hour’s sound sleep in the course of the afternoon. His speech was distinctly marked with a Scottish intonation, that seemed to every one both pleasing and appropriate, and this, when he chose, he could broaden to the widest limits of the vernacular. His voice was always of a surprising strength and resonance, even when phthisis had laid its hand most heavily upon him. It was the one gift he really possessed for the stage, and in reading aloud he was unsurpassed. In his full rich tones there was a sympathetic quality that seemed to play directly on the heart-strings like the notes of a violin…. His hearing was singularly acute, although the appreciation of the exact pitch of musical notes was wanting. But between delicate shades of pronunciation he could discriminate with a great precision.

  My credo as to “R. L. S.” is brief; that Stevenson was one of the bravest, sweetest, and most winsome of men, an artist in every nerve, and a writer of infinite charm; but that, being human, indeed in its merits and defects poignantly human, he had a more or less distracting swarm of minor inconsistencies and flaws habitually in evidence about the honey of his brilliant mind and his good and sane heart. It is not to be supposed that anything recently written could hurt the good fame of R. L. S. We have his works, his letters, the record of worthy deeds and of a brave and loyal life. He had hardly a friend who did not love the man more than his writings, for all their winsomeness, their art, their power at times, their perpetual atmosphere of youth, of life. If there are people who “call off” because of some hard-hitting, it is not R. L. S. who is the loser. The more he stands revealed in his weakness as well as in his strength, in his failures as in his achievements, in his vices as in his virtues, the more lovable and, in the end, the more admirable does he appear.

  I have visited him in a lonely lodging—it was previous to his happy marriage—and found him submerged in billows of bedclothes; 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 before he did. I found Stevenson a man of 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. His was a superior organisation that seems never to have been tainted by things common or unclean; one more likely to be revolted than appealed to by carnality in any form. A man unfleshly to the verge of emaciation, and, in this connection, I am not unmindful of a market in fleshpots not beneath the consideration of sanctimonious speculators; but here was a man whose sympathies were literary and artistic; whose intimacies were born and bred above the ears.

Treasure Island, 1883

  To whom we could almost have raised a statue in the market-place for having written “Treasure Island.”

  The best boys’ story since Marryatt, and one of a literary excellence to which Marryatt could make no pretensions.

  “Treasure Island” is a piece of astounding ingenuity, in which the manner is taken from “Robinson Crusoe,” and the plot belongs to the era of the detective story.

  “Treasure Island” is, properly speaking, a boy’s book, but, like “Robinson Crusoe” (the only book with which it ought to be compared, though “Reuben Davidger” runs it close), children of a larger growth are fascinated by it. There is not a dull page in it, and every incident seems to be, in turn, more effective than the other. We hurry through it, eager to be in at the death; we feel, at the end, as if we had been among the pirates and endured many a strange adventure; and then we read it again, rolling it, like a sweet morsel, under the tongue.

Kidnapped, 1886

  “Kidnapped” is the outstanding boy’s book of its generation.

  The whole of “Kidnapped” is written with so much salt and piquancy, such happy invention, and fullest measure of the author’s spirit of dexterity and finish, of his power of humorously graphic portraiture, as to make it stand out pre-eminent even among Mr. Stevenson’s own works.

  It may be said of “Kidnapped’ that there is absolutely no love-interest, and we have been so starved of the feminine element that the good-natured lass at Limekilns, who so pluckily saves the pair of fugitives, quite takes our eye, so that we feel it quite ungallant of Stevenson when he, so to speak, slams the door of his tale in her face the moment his Dioscuri have no further use for her. To some extent friendship takes the place of love in the story, and the humours of the two friends towards each other are the only substitute we have for the lovers’ differences and misunderstandings of the more ordinary plot. Later on we shall meet David in love, and a pretty bad job he would have made of it, left to himself.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886

  I doubt whether any one has the right so to scrutinise “The abysmal deeps of personality.” You see I have been reading Dr. Jekyll. At least I think he ought to bring more of distinct belief in the resources of human nature, more faith, more sympathy with our frailty, into the matter than you have done. The art is burning and intense. The Peau de Chagrin disappears, and Poe’s work is water…. Louis, how had you the “ilia dura, ferro et ære triplici duriora,” to write Dr. Jekyll? I know now what was meant when you were called a sprite…. The suicide end of Dr. Jekyll is too commonplace. Dr. Jekyll ought to have given Mr. Hyde up to justice. This would have vindicated the sense of human dignity which is so horribly outraged in your book.

  The subject is one which has haunted literature and men’s minds for ages; and perhaps Mr. Stevenson, by transferring the ghost to a living and comfortable bourgeois, may have done something to allay its wanderings. It seems, however, as if the possibilities of the theme would have admitted of a treatment a trifle finer and more subtle than he has chosen to give it. It may be misreading the intention of the book, with its hint of unfathomed depths in the soul, to suggest that the evil of Mr. Hyde is hardly that which would belong to Dr. Jekyll; but its effect as a tale of situation and moral would scarcely have been marred if the link of connection between the two characters had been a little more delicate, and the individuality of each more carefully worked out. As it is, its gruesomeness has just a touch of the perfunctory: it does not thrill with so poetic a terror as that stirred by the inimitable one-legged sailor in “Treasure Island,” or by the ghastliness of Thrawn Janet.

  “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” was the flashing inspiration of a dream, worked out, however, not in a flash, but in patient toil.

  If “The Pavilion of the Links” has claims to be considered a masterpiece, and may confidently hope to stand the merciless test of time, the same must also be conceded to “Dr. Jekyll.” In fact, of the two, “Dr. Jekyll,” though slightly inferior as a work of art, has the greater certainty of longevity. The allegory within it would lengthen its days, even should new methods and changes of taste take the charm from the story. As long as man remains a dual being, as long as he is in danger of being conquered by his worse self, and, with every defeat, finds it the more difficult to make a stand, so long “Dr. Jekyll” will have a personal and most vital meaning to every poor, struggling human being. Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur, so craftily is the parable worked out that it never obtrudes itself upon the reader or clogs the action of the splendid story. It is only on looking back, after he has closed the book, that he sees how close is the analogy and how direct the application.

  A bit of criticism may be permitted, in which most readers will agree. On the morning of March 12, the record of the time bears: “Read a most powerful and extraordinary story by R. L. Stevenson: ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.’” In the few days which followed, I read the story seven times over, with as much care as when of old preparing for an examination: watching every clause of every sentence, and its bearing. The story deserves to be studied in that way. And its moral is most awful: but irresistibly true.

  Only a Scotsman could have written the “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” as only a New Englander could have written the “Scarlet Letter.” There is an inheritance from the Covenanters and a memory of the Shorter Catechism in Stevenson’s bending and twisting the dark problems of our common humanity to serve as the core of his tales.

  Even in so fine a story as “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” the reader is unjustifiably cheated into attempting a natural solution of apparently inexplicable phenomena. The supernatural solution, when it comes, is no solution; there are a hundred ways of explaining the impossible by the impossible.

  What piece of prose fiction is less likely to be forgotten? To begin with, the central idea, strange as it is, at once comes home to everybody…. This is the only case where Mr. Stevenson, working by himself, has used a mystery; and most skilfully it is used in the opening chapters to stimulate curiosity…. In the third part, when the mystery has been solved, nothing but consummate art could have saved the interest from collapsing. But Jekyll’s own written statement gives the crowning emotion when it recites the drama that passed in the study behind the locked door; the appalling conflict between the two personages in the same outwardly changing breast. Other writers have approached the same idea. Gautier, for instance, has a curious story of a gentleman who gets translated into another man’s body to court the other’s wife; but Mr. Stevenson has everything to gain by the comparison.

  Mr. Stevenson was in town, now and again, at the old Savile Club which had the tiniest and blackest of smoking rooms. Here, or somewhere, he spoke to me of an idea of a tale, a Man who was Two Men. I said “William Wilson!” and declared that it would never do. But his “Brownies,” in a vision of the night, showed him the central scene, and he wrote “Jekyll and Hyde.” My “friend of these days and of all days,” Mr. Charles Longman, sent me the manuscript. In a very common-place London drawing-room, at 10:30 P. M., I began to read it. Arriving at the place where Utterson, the lawyer, and the butler wait outside the Doctor’s room, I threw down the MS. and fled in a hurry. I had no taste for solitude any more. The story won its great success, partly by dint of the moral (whatever that may be), more by its terrible lucid visionary power. I remember Mr. Stevenson telling me, at this time, that he was doing some “regular crawlers,” for this purist had a boyish habit of slang, and I think it was he who called Julius Cæsar “the howlingest cheese who ever lived.” One of the “crawlers” was “Thrawn Janet;” after “Wandering Willie’s Tale” (but certainly after it), to my taste, it seems the most wonderful story of the “supernatural” in our language.

  A subject much in his thoughts at this time was the duality of man’s nature and the alternation of good and evil; and he was for a long while casting about for a story to embody this central idea. Out of this frame of mind had come the sombre imagination of “Markheim,” but that was not what he required. The true story still delayed, till suddenly one night he had a dream. He awoke and found himself in possession of two, or rather three, of the scenes in “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Its waking existence, however, was by no means without incident. He dreamed these scenes in considerable detail, including the circumstance of the transforming powders, and so vivid was the impression that he wrote the story off at a red heat, but just as it had presented itself to him in his sleep.

  In his journey to the Cevennes he reflects that every one of us travels about with a donkey. In his “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” the donkey becomes a devil. Every Jekyll is haunted by his Hyde. Somebody said that “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” showed Stevenson as Poe, with the addition of a moral sense. Critics may differ as to the exact literary value of the famous little book, but as an expression of Stevenson’s deepest thought about life it will retain its interest. He was not content to dwell in a world where the lines are drawn clear, where the sheep are separated from the goats. He would have a foot in both worlds, content to dwell neither wholly with the sheep nor wholly with the goats. No doubt his ruling interest was in ethical problems, and he could be stern in his moral judgments, as, for example, in his discussion of the character of Burns.

Master of Ballantrae, 1889

  In his latest romance “The Master of Ballantrae” Stevenson seems to have touched high-water mark. I am tempted to go beyond this and say that no modern work of fiction in the English Language rises higher in the scale of literary merit than this.

  If a strong story, strongly told, full of human interest, and absolutely original in its situations, makes a masterpiece, then this may lay claim to the title.

  “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.

  There is a scene in “The Master of Ballantrae” which, powerful as it is, has never, I confess, been a favourite of mine, because the story is so utterly repulsive from the beginning to the end—the conflict of a scoundrel against a maniac narrated by a coward. But in “The Master of Ballantrae” there is a scene which we see before us vividly as I see your faces now, where the old steward comes out with a silver candle in each hand glaring into the still and silent night, ushering the brothers to their death struggle like a landlord handing out illustrious guests to their apartments. He walks through the night, and he holds the lights while they fight, and you next see the dead body, or seemingly dead body, of the elder lying with the wax candles flickering on each side in the silent night, and when again the steward returns, the body is gone, one wax candle has fallen down, the other is upright, still flickering over the bloodshed. Can you not all see it as you read it in the page of Stevenson? To me there seems nothing more vivid in all history.

  “The Master of Ballantrae,” a weird and striking tale of the times of “the forty-five,” is extraordinarily graphic both in its descriptions of places and of people. The gloomy house of Durrisdeer, with its stately panelled hall, the fine grounds so carefully laid out, the thick shrubberies, the spot where the duel was fought on the hard, frozen ground by the light of the flickering candles in the tall silver candlesticks, the wave-beaten point where the smuggling luggers land goods and passengers, and finally the awful journey through the uncleared woods of America, make a fit setting, in our memories, for the splendidly drawn pictures of the three Duries, the old father, the unappreciated Henry, the mocking master, their faithful land-steward, Mackellar, and the more shadowy personalities of the Frenchman, the lady, and the children. The tale is one of unrelieved horror, but it is a masterpiece nevertheless, and it has had a very large sale.

Poems

  His art has a stronger hold on nature. Were he only the bright and clever man of talent, who does the bright and clever thing that a man may do with his talent, it would be easy enough to dismiss him with a hatful of thanks and compliments. But we who have read the half dozen books which he has given us must see clearly that we have to deal, not with talent, but with that strange and precious thing which we call genius. If he does no more than he has done—and he gives every sign and promise of doing more—Robert Louis Stevenson is one of these men whom we have to label with the name of genius. And the mission of genius, however it reveal itself, is sad at bottom. There is much in this book [“A Child’s Garden of Verses”] that we may teach to the children, at our side; there is much that we may smile over, remembering the childhood from which we grew; but there is also something there that hints of the stifled childhood in us that never grew up; some thing that touches us with a deep, half-understood, wholly unspeakable grief.

  There is in these poems [“Underwoods”] little or nothing either of that originality or of that satisfying beauty which conjointly characterise Mr. Stevenson’s best prose.

  Now, as a minor but genuine example of poetic art, not alone for art’s sake, but for dear nature’s sake,—in the light of whose maternal smile all art must thrive and blossom if at all,—take “A Child’s Garden of Verses” by Stevenson. This is a real addition to the lore for children, and to that for man, to whom the child is father. The flowers of this little garden spring from the surplusage of a genius that creates nothing void of charm and originality. Thanks, then, for the fresh, pure touch, for the revelation of childhood with its vision of the lands of Nod and Counterpane, and of those next-door Foreign Lands spied from cherry-tree top, and beyond the trellised wall.

  It would be arrogant in the extreme to decide whether or no Mr. R. L. Stevenson’s poems will be read in the future. They are, however, so full of character, so redolent of his own fascinating temperament, that it is not too bold to suppose that so long as his prose is appreciated those who love that will turn to this. There have been prose writers whose verse has not lacked accomplishment or merit, but has been so far from interpreting their prose that it rather disturbed its effect and weakened its influence.

  The volume [“A Child’s Garden of Verses”] is a wonder, for the extraordinary vividness with which it reproduces early impressions; a child might have written it if a child could see childhood from the outside, for it would seem that only a child is really near enough to the nursery-floor. And what is peculiar to Mr. Stevenson is that it is his own childhood he appears to delight in, and not the personal presence of little darlings. Oddly enough, there is no strong implication that he is fond of babies; he doesn’t speak as a parent, or an uncle, or an educator—he speaks as a contemporary absorbed in his own game.

  Fascinating as his verses are, artless in the perfection of art, they take no reader a step forward. The children of whom he sings so sweetly are cherubs without souls.

  His “Child’s Garden of Verses” is delightful. It is fresh, new, unconventional, unexpected; it has grace and it has charm; but despite all these qualities we receive it rather as the play of a prose writer than as the work of a poet. And so with his new book of ballads. They are dramatic, picturesque, vigorous. They are as direct and lusty as anyone could wish, but they are not convincingly poetic. They are not inevitable enough, as Wordsworth would say. They are rather the recreation of one of the cleverest literary artificers of modern times, than the work of a poet who sings in numbers because his speech is naturally rhythmic. Mr. Stevenson wrote these ballads because he wanted to write them, not because he could not help it.

  In these ballads there are infelicities of expression and defects of style which it is hard to believe that the author of “Kidnapped” could have allowed to remain in any work of his, whether in prose or verse, except by way of a joke.

  The gallant muse of Mr. Stevenson has already played many parts in literature. Even here, in the course of a page or two, we have had occasion to refer to the author of “Treasure Island” as a writer of nursery, and of dialect poetry. His best verse, his most distinctive metrical compositions, must be classed under yet another heading. His Polynesian “Ballads” are too long to be quoted here in full, and they do not lend themselves to the extract. But, in spite of one noticeable and regrettable falling away, it is in these ballads that the author’s finest and most characteristic poetry is to be found.

  In spite of that unique achievement “A Child’s Garden of Verses,” at the time of its publication the only collection of poems in the tongue properly to be called child poetry in contradistinction from poetry about children for the delectation of older folk,—the critic might well have hesitated to award to Stevenson the proud names of singer and maker. But with the appearance of the final edition of his metrical work, permitting for the first time an opinion based upon a complete survey, such reserve becomes unnecessary. The forty additional pieces of the final edition chiefly constitute the ground for the consideration of Stevenson as a verse-writer of individuality and fine accomplishment. They show his genius at its ripest, and are as interesting for their mastery of the art of verse as they are moving in the imaginative revelation of his deepest nature. For strength and beauty we should, on the whole, point to them as the Scotchman’s most authentic gift to poetry.

  The celebrated “Child’s Garden of Verses,” as decisive and important a success in its own field of literature as “Treasure Island” had been two years before. The field was in this case almost wholly new; the “Child’s Garden” may be said not only to have founded a new school, but to have opened up a new side of life, and to be a substantial contribution towards the theory of human development and the science of psychology.

Letters

  Such as they remain, then, these letters will be found a varied record, perfectly frank and familiar, of the writer’s every-day moods, thoughts, and doings during his Samoan exile. They tell, with the zest and often in the language of a man who remained to the last a boy in spirit, of the pleasures and troubles of a planter founding his home in the virgin soil of a tropical island; the pleasures of an invalid beginning after many years to resume habits of outdoor life and exercise; the toils and satisfactions, failures and successes, of a creative artist whose invention was as fertile as his standards were high and his industry unflinching. These divers characters have probably never been so united in any man before. Something also they tell of the inward movements and affections of one of the bravest and tenderest of human hearts.

  It is when we hold in our hands in bound volumes the Letters of one we have seen in the body and whose books and papers as they fell from him were always, in whatever mood they found us, sources of pleasure and delight, that we feel in all its sharpness the sting of death. Then we realize how the end has indeed come and that we have before us the last effort of a master of expression to express himself…. The reader of these Letters, if he will but ruminate a little over them and not be in too great a hurry to return them to the Lending Library from whence cometh his Literature, will find, scattered up and down them, food for his fancy and matter for his thought. He will be able to compare the rough core with the finished ornament, the thought as it struck the brain and as it is to be found recorded in one or another of the writer’s books or papers. This is always an interesting parallelism. One strange feeling had evidently great possession of Stevenson, a romantic attachment to the memory of Robert Fergusson, the ill-fated forerunner in modern Scottish song of Robert Burns…. How in time to come Stevenson’s Letters may chance to compare with Pliny’s or with Cicero’s, with Cowper’s or with Lamb’s, I am at no pains to inquire. To thousands of living men and women Stevenson was a friend and an ally, and they it is at all events who have the first reading of his letters.

  The letters are not quite perfect letters, but that was hardly to be looked for in the case of a writer whose special gift lay in the painful and slowly-rewarded search for the perfect word, a labour no one would undergo in writing to his friends. But for us, at this moment, there are few, if any, more readable letters in the language. They are full to the very brim of life, of humour, of strangeness, of wisdom, goodness, book-knowledge, breadth of human sympathy—in one word, of Robert Louis Stevenson…. They show us that the delightfulness of the man’s nature, as we saw him in the Essays, or “The Inland Voyage,” was not the mere pose or trick of a clever man of letters, but was the very fact and essence of him as he lived and spoke. And we grow prouder of him too. For we see that when he comes to be given his definite place in the great company into which all who can judge in these matters saw from the first that he would be called, it will be, not at all among the greatest, no doubt, but among the very best that he will be found. No man among them all—not Scott himself—was more beautifully free from the common faults of the man whose chief business is writing. These letters show him to us snow-pure from any stain of envy, jealousy, or suspicion. He is liberal to profusion in his encouragement of young rivals; he is humble almost to excess when he thinks of his great predecessors.

  We are sorry, we repeat, that these letters have been given to the world. So far as Stevenson’s reputation is concerned they can only detract from it. When they illustrate him on his best side they merely emphasise what his works illustrate so abundantly that further illustration is a mere work of supererogation. When they present him, as for the most part they do, in dishabille, they exhibit him very greatly to his disadvantage. If Professor Colvin had printed about one-third of them, and retained his excellent elucidatory introductions, which form practically a biography of Stevenson, he would have produced a work for which all admirers of that most pleasing writer would have thanked him. As it is, he has been guilty, in our opinion, of a grave error of judgment.

  In the “Letters” no man using English speech has chattered more unreservedly, and with more essential charm; it is the undress of literature that always instinctively stops this side of etiquette, of decency. The Stevenson epistles drive us on a still-hunt outside of the mother-tongue for their equal, with little prospect of quarry save within French borders.

General

  I wonder how many people there are in England who know that Robert Louis Stevenson is, in his own way (and he is wise enough to write simply in his own way), one of the most perfect writers living, one of the very few who may yet do something that will become classical?

  He is a critic in method and intelligence, and an advocate in manner and temperament; and he makes you glad or sorry as—with his reflections and conclusions—he has made himself before you. If his criticism were less acute and methodical than it is, the accent and the terms in which it is conveyed would sometimes get it mistaken for an outcome of mere æsthetic emotion. As it is, the critic is equally apparent in it with the man; you can see that the strong feeling has come of clear thinking, and what is purely intellectual is rendered doubly potent and persuasive by the human sentiment with which it is associated. It is possible that this fact will ultimately militate against the success of Mr. Stevenson’s “Studies” as criticism; for criticism—a science disguised as Art—is held to be incapable of passion. I cannot but think, however, that it will always count for a great deal in their favour as literature, and that meanwhile it clothes them with uncommon interest and attraction.

  The quality by which Mr. Stevenson is chiefly distinguished, and which differentiates his writing from the story-writing of the period, is imagination—the power of creating characters which are as real as creatures of flesh and blood, and of devising and shaping events which are as inevitable as fate. Beyond all the writers of his time, he is remarkable for clearness and accuracy of vision; he seems to see, and we believe he does see, all that he describes, and he makes all his readers see likewise. How he accomplishes this last feat, which is a very uncommon one, we have never been able to discover, for on returning to a scene or a chapter which has impressed us deeply, which has sent the blood tingling through our veins, or has darkened our souls with foreboding, we have always failed to detect the secret of his power. It can hardly be in his language which is always of the simplest, nor in the feeling that he depicts, which is always natural, and often common; but it is there all the same.

  Mr. Stevenson delights in a style, and his own has nothing accidental or diffident; it is eminently conscious of its responsibilities and meets them with a kind of gallantry—as if language were a pretty woman and a person who proposes to handle it had, of necessity, to be something of a Don Juan. This element of the gallant is a noticeable part of his nature, and it is rather odd that, at the same time, a striking feature of the nature should be an absence of care for things feminine. His books are for the most part books without women, and it is not women who fall most in love with them. But Mr. Stevenson does not need, as we may say, a petticoat to enflame him; a happy collocation of words will serve the purpose, or a singular image, or the bright eye of a passing conceit, and he will carry off a pretty paradox without so much as a scuffle.

  Truly in his power to “harrow up the soul, freeze the young blood,” etc., Stevenson is unsurpassed by modern writers. We feel our flesh creep upon our bones as we sit absorbed in some of his weird and witch-like tales. Then, though we may be ashamed to confess it, we seem to lose our years, and shrink into an eager, uninitiated boy once more, as we huddle over “Treasure Island” or “Kidnapped,” “The New Arabian Nights” or “The Black Arrow,” letting the hour-hand on the clock creep on to midnight unheeded; we may protest that it is the sheerest juvenile nonsense in the world, but none the less are we held by a spell; there are no pauses, no tame meanderings, when we might break away and be gone; but the racy narrator hurries us on over adventurous by-ways, twisting and turning, bursting upon new surprises, dashing into dangerous pit-falls, until breathless, we come plump into an unwelcome Finis, and close the book perforce.

  I look forward to the work of Robert Louis Stevenson with more eagerness than to that of any other author of to-day. I rejoice in the exquisite quality of his style; I am the captive of his intimate and enchanting verse; in his literary essays I find an unfailing delight; and as for his stories, which he and I both like, I do not mean that he shall ever write one which I do not read.

  In depicting the characters of others who stood about him in his boyhood he not only succeeds in making them lifelike, but he lends his own appreciation to our eyes, and we see them by the help of his memories and associations. They are Scotchmen of the type known to the world…. He has many admirable sentences struck clear with the die of the workman who knows the craft in its intellectual laws as well as in its mechanical execution, by his mind as well as his hand.

  Where is the man among us who could write another “Virginibus Puerisque,” the most delightful volume for the hammock ever sung in prose?… He has attained a popularity such as is, as a rule, only accorded to classic authors or to charlatans. For this he has America to thank rather than Britain, for the Americans buy his books, the only honor a writer’s admirers are slow to pay him. Mr. Stevenson’s reputation in the United States is creditable to that country, which has given him a position here in which only a few saw him when he left. Unfortunately, with popularity has come publicity. All day the reporters sit on his garden wall.

  Yet there is one thing lacking in Stevenson’s style. It is not distinctive, not characteristic; it does not reveal the man, but rather hides him. The motley of Lamb, the homespun of Swift, the imperial purple of De Quincey, clothe them in shining garments which sit easily upon them. Stevenson’s, with all its beauty, is a misfit style. It is measured for the Apollo Belvidere, not for him. We feel, somehow, that he is in disguise, that his livery is a stolen one. There is an element, too, of the fictitious in his humor, his wit, his morality, his philosophy—as of something assumed rather than innate. We yield him an admiration which, after all, we do not quite believe in. We can not away with a lurking doubt. Is this Moses, or a false priest who performs similar marvels? Is it miracle or sleight of hand?

  He can claim to have mastered the whole gamut of fiction. His short stories are good, and his long ones are good. On the whole, however, the short ones are the more characteristic, and the more certain to retain their position in English literature. The shorter effort suits his genius. With some choice authors, as with some rare vintages, a sip gives the real flavour better than a draught. It is eminently so with Mr. Stevenson. His novels have all conspicuous virtues, but they have usually some flaw, some drawback, which may weaken their permanent value. In the tales, or at least in the best of the tales, the virtues are as conspicuous as ever, but the flaws have disappeared. The merits of his short stories are more readily assessed too as his serious rivals in that field are few indeed, Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Stevenson: those are the three, put them in what order you will, who are the greatest exponents of the short story in our language.

  It is as a writer of romances that Mr. Stevenson is most widely read and popular, and as an essayist that his intimates know and love him, for his books for boys are among the best that have ever been written and his essays are the most fascinating that have appeared in England since the tune of Lamb. Not the finest critical essays, be it understood, but the most delightful of the discursive, fanciful, frankly egotistical description, dealing with human relations, with sentiment, conduct, or mental experience, with the essence of literature rather than its accidents or objective manifestations…. Mr. Stevenson’s quality is not so much style in the classical sense, as that of Milton or Gibbon, or even of Addison, but he has an exquisite ear for prose rhythms, and an absurd felicity of expression which leaves us in doubt whether to laugh or to cry aloud with pleasure. His power is that of the striking and picturesque use of words, of lucid exposition, of coloured and graphic narration, and his pages have a quality like velvet—a delicate pile or bloom, soft and buoyant, yet lustrous and full of intricate light and shade. His sentences make their way into the mind with a courtly, considerate tactfulness, and linger pleasantly in the memory, while he relates, argues, illustrates his meaning, or repeats himself with a difference until he is sure of being fully understood, writing with an evident and infectious delight in words, and rejoicing in the alertness and agility of his brain.

  For ease there has been nothing like Stevenson’s style since Lamb, while for vivacity and vividness there is nothing like it elsewhere in English prose. The richer rhythms he perhaps lacks, and his tone has possibly at times a touch of affectation. But no more subtle instrument of human thought has ever been wielded more gracefully outside the shores of France.

  When he writes of himself, how supremely excellent is the reading. It is good even when he does it intentionally, as in “Portraits and Memories.” It is better still when he sings it, as in his “Child’s Garden.” He is irresistible to every lonely child who reads and thrills, and reads again to find his past recovered for him with effortless ease. It is a book never long out of my hands, for only in it and in my dreams when I am touched with fever, do I grasp the long, long thoughts of a lonely child and a hill-wandering boy—thoughts I never told to any; yet which Mr. Stevenson tells over again to me as if he read them off a printed page.

  It was difficult to name a living artist in words that could be compared with him who reminded us at every turn of Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt. There are certain writers who compel words to serve them and never travel without an imperial body guard; but words waited on Stevenson like “humble servitors,” and he went where he pleased in his simplicity because every one flew to anticipate his wishes. His style had the thread of gold, and he was the perfect type of the man of letters—a humorist whose great joy in the beautiful was annealed to a fine purity by his Scottish faith; whose kinship was not with Boccaccio and Rabelais, but with Dante and Spenser. His was the magical touch that no man can explain or acquire; it belongs to those only who have drunk at the Pierian spring.

  He fashioned his life after his own heart, like the artist he was. In the game against Fate, he made the very utmost of the cards he held, playing so skillfully as to score even with the weak suit of bodily health. Within its limits, his life was a masterpiece…. He never wrote anything more consummate in their kind than the “New Arabian Nights;” yet one is glad to think that these exercises in blood-curdling humour came at the beginning of his career as a story-teller, and the Dutch scenes of “Catriona” near the close. In “Treasure Island,” masterpiece though it be, he is still imitating, parodying, pouring his genius into a ready made form. In “Kidnapped” he breaks away, half unwittingly perhaps, from the boy’s-book convention. “The Master of Ballantrae” is an independent, self-sufficing romance, no more imitative than “The Bride of Lammermoor” or “Esmond;” and “Catriona,” imperfect though it be in structure, carries the boy’s book projected in “Kidnapped” into the higher region of serious character-study and exquisite emotion. Not even Catriona—that pearl of maidenhood, whom Viola and Perdita would hail as their very sister—not even Catriona has succeeded in dissipating the illusion that Robert Louis Stevenson could not draw a woman…. For my own part, I believe that Stevenson’s greatness in prose has unduly overshadowed the rare and quite individual charm of his verse. It is true that verse was not his predestinate medium, that he wrote it rather as a man of consummate literary accomplishment than as a born poet, who “did but sing because he must.” But on the other hand, he never wrote save from a genuine poetic impulse; he never lashed himself into a metric frenzy merely because it was his trade. Therefore all his verse is alive with spontaneous feeling, and so unfailing was his mastery of words, that he succeeded in striking a clear, true note that was all his own. In his lighter rhymes, both in the “Child’s Garden” and “Underwoods,” there is a cool, fresh, limpid grace, in which I, for one, never fail to find pleasure and refreshment; and his blank verse, if it lacked freedom and variety of accent, attained a singular dignity, as of exquisite carving in alabaster.

  We are told by those who are always critics and always objectors—and nothing in this world was ever done by critics and objectors—we are told by them that, after all, the works of Robert Louis Stevenson are his best memorials. In one sense that is undoubtedly true. No man of ancient or modern times since the beginning of the world has ever left behind him so splendid a collection of his works as has Robert Louis Stevenson—I mean not merely of what they contain, but the outward and visible form of them.

  Commonplace morality and conventional expression are impossible to him, his questing avidity could never be harnessed in the shafts of everyday purpose. In an age of journalism, of barren repetition and fruitless expatiation, it is high praise to give even to a great prose-writer to say of him that he never proses. This praise is due to Stevenson; his chisel, which rang in the workshops of many masters, was always wielded under the direction of a marvellously quick eye, by a hand that gathered strength and confidence every year. He has left no slovenly work, none that has not an inimitable distinction, and the charm of expression that belongs only to a rare spirit. If the question be raised of his eventual place in the great hierarchy of English writers, it is enough to say that the tribunal that shall try his claims is not yet in session; when the time comes he will be summoned to the bar, not with the array of contemporaries whose names a foolish public linked to his, but with the chief prose-writers of the century, few of whom can face the trial with less to extenuate and less to conceal.

  Adopting to the full, and something more than the full, the modern doctrine of the all-importance of art, of manner, of style in literature, Mr. Stevenson early made the most elaborate studies in imitative composition. There is no doubt that he at last succeeded in acquiring a style which was quite his own; but it was complained and with justice, that even to the last he never attained complete ease in this style; that its mannerism was not only excessive but bore, as even excessive mannerism by no means always does, the marks of distinct and obvious effort. This was perhaps most notable in his essays, which were further marred by the fact that much of them was occupied by criticism, for which, though his taste was original and delicate, Stevenson’s knowledge was not quite solid enough, and his range of sympathies a little deficient in width. In his stories, on the other hand, the devil’s advocate detected certain weak points, the chief of them being an incapacity to finish, and either a distaste or incapacity for introducing women. This last charge was finally refuted by “Catriona,” not merely in the heroine, but in the much more charming and lifelike figure of Barbara Grant; but the other was something of a true bill to the last. It was Stevenson’s weakness (as by the way it was also Scott’s) to huddle up his stories rather than to wind them off to an orderly conclusion. But against this allowance—a just but an ample one—for defects, must be set to Stevenson’s credit such a combination of literary and story-telling charm as perhaps no writer except Mérimée has ever equalled; while, if the literary side of him had not the golden perfection, the accomplished ease of the Frenchman, his romance has a more genial, a fresher, a more natural quality.

  Perfect accord between sense and sound, perfect beauty of sound, and a perfect avoidance of palpable artifice—these, with freshness and a very masculine vigor, are the qualities of Stevenson’s prose style.

  The place that Stevenson will take in literature is surely not to be made evident so long as the glamour of his personality remains over those who were his contemporaries. And with this personality so fully interwoven with his works, it seems hard to believe that the glamour can soon fade away. It is easy to imagine that, like Charles Lamb, he can never become wholly a “figure in literature,” but will remain vividly present to many generations of readers as a gifted child of genius who is to be fervently loved.

  It is the holiday mood of life that Stevenson expresses, and no one has ever expressed it with a happier abandonment to the charm of natural things. In its exquisite exaggeration, it is the optimism of the invalid, due to his painful consciousness that health, and the delights of health, are what really matter in life…. In the phrase of Beddoes, Stevenson was “tired of being merely human.” Thus there are no women in his books, no lovers; only the lure of hidden treasures and the passion of adventure. It was for the accidents and curiosities of life that he cared, for life as a strange picture, for its fortunate confusions, its whimsical distresses, its unlikely strokes of luck, its cruelties, sometimes, and the touch of madness that comes into it at moments. For reality, for the endeavor to see things as they are, to represent them as they are, he had an impatient disregard. These matters did not interest him.

  His plays—written in collaboration with Mr. W. E. Henley—had a power of their own, and one of them, “Beau Austin,” although not accepted by the public is probably the greatest contribution to the drama of the era.

  It would be hard to choose among Stevenson’s books; his exquisite mastery of form, and of all that form can do, no less than his gay and gallant heart, is in them all.

  Of all the writers of English fiction of the younger generation, the impression of the highest genius was probably conveyed by Robert Louis Stevenson—an impression which his many admirers hold, notwithstanding the conviction that nothing he has ever done, however exquisite, has quite realized all his possibilities. It is indeed singularly to Stevenson’s credit that no achievement in literature to which he might have risen, however high, would have been altogether a surprise to anyone acquainted with his work. For all have admitted in him a rare distinction of style, the qualities of a fine imagination, humour and pathos in a high degree, the fancy of the poet, and the sympathy, both wise and tender, of the genial lover of his kind.

  The romantic movement in fiction, except in so far as it is mere reaction from pessimistic realism, is again a sign of reviving strength. And it is a fortunate circumstance for the future of literature that its leader and foremost representative should have possessed the distinguished literary gift of Robert Louis Stevenson, a writer whose exquisitely finished style, while for the reader it suffers somewhat from its evidences of too conscious art, affords for that very reason an all the more inspiring and serviceable model to the student. His influence is largely traceable in all the lighter literature of the imagination of the present day, and, due allowance being made for the dangers which beset all young writers still in the imitative stage, it has been on the whole, an influence for good.

  Writing was to him an art, and almost everything that he has written has a little the air of being a tour de force. Stevenson’s books and essays were generally brilliant imitations of established things, done somewhat in the spirit of an expert in billiards. In short, Stevenson is the most extraordinary mimic that has ever appeared in literature.

  Robert Louis Stevenson was the literary man pure and simple, in the sense that Hazlitt, or Leigh Hunt, or Matthew Arnold was, and this is his most honourable distinction…. Like those of the Wizard of the North, his writings are for the most part intensely Scottish…. In his criticisms, Stevenson, because he knew himself so well, at once seems to see with the eyes of his author and to know his mind. What fine discrimination in his essay on that enigma of seventeenth-century character, Samuel Pepys. What anatomising and analysis of François Villon, blackguard and poet! It is doubtful if any of the host of writers who have blamed or excused Robert Burns has arrived more nearly at the truth than this keen critic in his famous essay on the “Old Hawk.” Yet he neither weeps nor grows abusive. He is sane, truthful, judicious…. In his short stories Stevenson seems to occupy a middle place between Hawthorne and Poe. He is neither so moonstruck an idealist as the former, nor so ghastly a realist as the latter. If he does terrify us now and then, the feeling is mixed with delight and wonder at his marvelous skill, his absolute precision in his epithets and phrases, his consummate artistic power.

  To attain the mastery of an elastic and harmonious English prose, in which trite and inanimate elements should have no place, and which should be supple to all uses and alive in all its joints and members, was an aim which he pursued with ungrudging, even with heroic, toil. Not always, especially not at the beginning, but in by far the greater part of his mature work, the effect of labour and fastidious selection is lost in the felicity of the result. Energy of vision goes hand in hand with magic of presentment, and both words and things acquire new meaning and a new vitality under his touch. Next to finish and brilliancy of execution, the most remarkable quality of his work is its variety. Without being the inventor of any new form or mode of literary art (unless, indeed, the verses of the “Child’s Garden” are to be accounted such), he handled with success and freshness nearly all the old forms—the moral, critical, and personal essay, travels sentimental and other, romances and short tales both historical and modern, parables and tales of mystery, boys’ stories of adventure, drama, memoir, lyrical and meditative verse both English and Scottish. To some of these forms he gave quite a new life: through all alike he expressed vividly his own extremely personal way of seeing and being, his peculiar sense of nature and of romance.

  Of course one has to agree that writing was to Stevenson an art, and also that, as Mr. Chapman acutely says, everything “he has written has a little the air of a tour de force.” But it is to be noted that nothing of his has this air so much when it is taken by itself as when it is taken in connection with other pieces of his work. In comparing “Treasure Island” with “The English Admirals,” or “The New Arabian Nights” with “The Beach at Falesa,” one cannot help seeing that sustained efforts in styles so different involve a strain even upon the highest literary skill. One may even be in doubt, in the presence of so many styles assumed with so much skill, what was really the writer’s own bent. Now we have the utmost sophistication, in which the style is a tissue, a panoply, of allusions, and now a “naked and open daylight,” in which the reader is not aware of style, and there is no explicit reminder that the writer has ever read anything. This versatility is bewildering, but Mr. Chapman is the only reader of Stevenson I know of who has found it irritating…. Is there a more transparent medium than the atmosphere through which we see the scenes and figures of his “picture-making romance?” The fight in the heather in “Kidnapped,” the trial in “David Balfour,” the duel in the dark in “The Master of Ballantrae”—who but Mr. Chapman fails to number these among the great achievements of modern fiction?

  Stevenson, who, brilliant though he was, had neither the accumulated resources of Scott, nor so luxuriant a fancy, collected his materials with immense pains, sifted them laboriously, and when he came to use them never rested till he had everything in its proper place, and displayed to the best possible advantage. His jewels are none of them rough diamonds. Every gem is cut, polished to the highest point, and set in gold of rare and cunning workmanship. But, conscious though he was, in every fibre, of his own art, he was far too shrewd not to acknowledge that it was beyond his power to reach the lofty eminence occupied by Scott, and that he could never have created the Baron of Bradwardine, or the Antiquary, or Jeanie Deans, nor woven together such a masterpiece as the plot of “Guy Mannering.” He spoke of Scott as “out and away the King of romantics,” who shared with Balzac and Thackeray in “Vanity Fair” “the real creator’s brush.”… There can be little doubt that what he wrote will stand the test of time, and that hereafter he will hold a place in the goodly fellowship of the immortals, but no man knew better than Stevenson that, far above them all, Scott moves himself along the higher ridges of the mountain-tops, unapproachable.

  The time has hardly come to assign Stevenson his position in English literature. It is not easy to separate his personality from his books; perhaps it will never be quite possible to separate them. The generation of critics who knew and loved him—and could not help infusing the rapture of love into their appreciations—must pass away before he can be judged in cold blood…. Like all men who are egotists, but whose egoism, owing to the sweetness of their nature, is never repellant, he was his own best critic. He says, not once but a thousand times, that the view of life which dominated him was the romantic-comic. Holding this view he could not help becoming the perpetuator of the traditions of Scott and Dumas…. Two generations of novelists have not produced a more effective short story than “The Pavilion on the Links.” As a Scottish poet, as an English critic, as a cosmopolitan moralist, Stevenson was confessedly the “sedulous ape” of Fergusson, of Hazlitt, of Montaigne, but not the equal of any one of the three, except in finish of style.

  Stevenson is open to a particularly subtle, a particularly effective and a particularly unjust disparagement. The advantage of great men like Blake or Browning or Walt Whitman is that they did not observe the niceties of technical literature. The far greater disadvantage of Stevenson is that he did. Because he had a conscience about small matters in art, he is conceived not to have had an imagination about big ones. It is assumed by some that he must have been a bad architect, and the only reason that they can assign is that he was a good workman. The mistake which has given rise to this conception is one that has much to answer for in numerous departments of modern art, literature, religion, philosophy, and politics. The supreme and splendid characteristic of Stevenson, was his levity; and his levity was the flower of a hundred grave philosophies…. He had what may be a perfect mental athleticism, which enabled him to leap from crag to crag, and to trust himself anywhere and upon any question. His splendid quality as an essayist and controversialist was that he could always recover his weapon. He was not like the average swashbuckler of the current parties, tugged at the tail of his own sword.

  His was the royal wholeness of a nature moving all together, without apology or evil discount. He had not to think of self but to be; not to cipher out an attitude to life but to live; not even to appoint himself a missionary of the doctrine of happiness to other men, like those actors who posture and snigger in order to raise a laugh, but simply to be happy and make that happiness, with its solid glow of heat, its own excuse for being. Such happiness is contagious; it needs no bolstering of propaganda; it awakens echoes, it calls out responsive cheer by its mere self-evidencing wholesomeness. This happiness in Stevenson was more than temperamental; it had based itself in the wise and penetrative spirit. Nor was it any shallow evasion of the deeps of life; it was at polar remove from the mere physical well-being of a gourmand, or the glee of an empty-headed dancer. It had made itself good against too much ill health for that; and underlying it were centuries of digested thought and doctrine. An efflorescence, a fruitage, it truly was, culminating from profound strains of vital meditation; it was, in a word, Stevenson’s religion, and when we consider all that went to the shaping of it, a religion fair and sufficient.

  What, precisely, was Mr. Henley’s share in the plays done jointly by Robert Louis Stevenson and himself?… Take “Macaire” first, “A Melodramatic Farce” it is called though it is rather a farce suddenly transformed, at last, into a melodrama. Stevenson, single-handed, was prolific of both these forms in his books. As examples of his farce we have the immortal “New Arabian Nights;” of his melodrama, “The Pavilion on the Links,” “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and the greater part of every romance that he wrote. Therefore there is no reason why he should not have alone conceived the plot of “Macaire.” There is (I forestall, unscientifically, the proper working of the process) very good reason to suppose that Mr. Henley did not conceive the plots of the plays written with Stevenson, inasmuch as he has never by himself shown any tendency to story-telling…. The choice of Macaire as protagonist is, surely, his also. Not only was Macaire among the figures enumerated by him as being in Skelt’s repertory, but the whole conception of Macaire—its difference from the traditional conception—is essentially Stevensonian. This eloquently philosophic scoundrel, this tatterdemalion with transcendental schemes for subjugating his fellows, is too like Stevenson’s Villon and Stevenson’s Dynamiter not to have sprung fully equipped from Stevenson’s own brain. His companion, too, Bertrand—how could one attribute him to anyone but that writer who always so persistently revelled and excelled in delineating a timid nature thrown into perilous affairs? The passion of fear was the one passion that Stevenson never could keep out of anything he wrote.

  Stevenson, by whatever means, acquired not only a delicate style, but a style of his own. If it sometimes reminds one of models, it does not suggest that he is speaking in a feigned voice. I think, indeed, that this precocious preoccupation with style suggests the excess of self-consciousness which was his most obvious weakness; a daintiness which does not allow us to forget the presence of the artist. But Stevenson did not yield to other temptations which beset the lover of exquisite form. He was no “æsthete” in the sense which conveys a reproach. He did not sympathise with the doctrine that an artist should wrap up himself in luxurious hedonism and cultivate indifference to active life. He was too much of a boy. A true boy cannot be “æsthetic.” He had “day-dreams,” but they were of piracy; tacit aspirations towards stirring adventure and active heroism. His dreams were of a future waking.

  Stevenson has already taken his place as an entertaining novelist of the second or third class, and his singularly lovable personality is not now mistaken for literary genius by any great number of persons.

  The title of this paper may seem to some not a particularly hopeful one. Stevenson, the romancist, we all know and rejoice in. Stevenson, the moral philosopher, to say the least of it, does not sound promising. So little are we apt to find of moral theory in the books we love best that we should be sorry to be set to seek even for morals. His best characters have few enough of the copy-book virtues; his worst are as bad as they are made; yet we find something admirable in them all.

  Stevenson’s romanticism shows itself most interestingly in a spirit of artistic enterprise and adventure. His novels and tales are more various and daring in their method and technique than those of any of his predecessors; and on the whole his artistic experiments justify themselves. In firmness and clearness of structure, in novelty and variety of method, methods of description and narrative, and in surface brilliancy of style, he marks the extraordinary technical advance which the novel has made since the days of Scott. For another reason, also, Stevenson’s name may fittingly stand at the end of a chapter on the English novel. He represents in a sense the return of the century upon itself.

  Stevenson with all his genius, made the mistake of approaching the theatre as a toy to be played with. The facts of the case were against him, for the theatre is not a toy; and, facts being stubborn things, he ran his head against them in vain. Had he only studied the conditions, or, in other words got into a proper relation to the facts, with what joy should we have acclaimed him among the masters of the modern stage!