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deed, eternally surprising to the other. Between the Latin and the Teuton races there are similar divergences, not to be bridged by the most liberal sympathy. It is better to face the fact and know, when you marry, that you take into your life a creature of equal if unlike frailties; whose weak human heart beats no more tunefully than yours.

If there is a grimness in that, it is as near as Mr. Stevenson ever comes to being grim, and we have only to turn the page to find the corrective-something delicately genial, at least, if not very much less sad:

"The blind bow-boy" who smiles upon us from the end of terraces in old Dutch gardens laughingly hails his bird-bolts among a fleeting generation. But for as fast as ever he shoots, the game dissolves and disappears into eternity from under his falling arrows; this one is gone ere he is struck; the other has but time to make one gesture and give one passionate cry; and they are all the things of a moment.

That is an admission that though it is soon over, the great sentimental surrender is inevitable. And there is geniality too, still over the page (in regard to quite another matter), geniality, at least, for the profession of letters, in the declaration that there is

one thing you can never make Philistine natures understand; one thing which yet lies on the surface, remains as unseizable to their wits as a high flight of metaphysics—namely, that the business of life is mainly carried on by the difficult art of literature, and accord ing to a man's proficiency in that art shall be the free

dom and fullness of his intercourse with other men.

Yet it is difficult not to believe that the ideal in which our author's spirit might most gratefully have rested would have been the character of the paterfamilias, when the eye falls on such a charming piece of observation as these lines about children, in the admirable paper on "Child's Play":

If it were not for this perpetual imitation, we should be tempted to fancy they despised us outright, or only considered us in the light of creatures brutally strong and brutally silly, among whom they condescended to dwell in obedience, like a philosopher at a

barbarous court.

II.

We know very little about a talent till we know where it grew up, and it would halt terribly at the start any account of the author of "Kidnapped" which should omit to insist promptly that he is a Scot of the Scots. Two facts, to my perception, go a great way to explain his composition, the first of which is that his boyhood was passed in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle, and the second, that he came of a family that had set up great lights on the coast. His grandfather, his uncle, were famous constructors of light-houses, and the name of the race is associated above all with the beautiful and beneficent tower of Skerryvore. We may exaggerate the way in which, in an im

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aginative youth, the sense of the "story" of things would feed upon the impressions of Edinburgh difficult really to do so. The streets are so though I suspect it would be full of history and poetry, of picture and song, of associations springing from strong passions and strange characters, that for my own part I find myself thinking of an urchin going and coming there as I used to think deringly, enviously of the small boys who figured as supernumeraries, pages, or imps in showy scenes at the theater; the place seems the background, the complicated “set" of a drama, and the children the mysterious little beings who are made free of the magic world. How must it not have beckoned on the imagination to pass and repass, on the way to school, under the Castle rock, conscious acutely, yet familiarly, of the gray citadel on the summit, lighted up with the tartans and bagpipes of Highland regiments! Mr. Stevenson's mind, from an early age, was furnished with the concrete Highlander, who must have had much of the effect that we nowadays call decorative. I encountered somewhere a fanciful paper of our author's* in which there is a reflection of half-holiday afternoons and, unless my own fancy plays me a trick, of lights red, in the winter dusk, in the high-placed windows of the Old Town-a delightful rhapsody on the penny sheets of figures for the puppet-shows of infancy, in life-like position, and awaiting the impatient yet careful scissors. "If landscapes were sold," he says in "Travels with a Donkey," "like the sheets of characters of my boyhood, one penny plain and twopence colored, I should go the length of twopence every day of my life."

Indeed, the color of Scotland has entered into him altogether, and though, oddly enough, he has written but little about his native country, his happiest work shows, I think, that she has the best of his ability. "Kidnapped" (whose inadequate title I may deplore in passing) breathes in every line the feeling of moor and loch, and is the finest of his longer stories; and "Thrawn Janet," a masterpiece in thirteen pages (lately republished in the volume of "The Merry Men"), is, among the shorter ones, the strongest in execution. The latter consists of a gruesome anecdote of the supernatural, related in the Scotch dialect; and the genuineness which this medium-at the sight of which, in general, the face of the reader grows long-wears in Mr. Stevenson's hands is a proof of how living the question of form always is to him, and what a variety of answers he has for it. It never would have occurred to us that the style of "Travels with a Donkey," or "Virginibus Puerisque," and the *Since reprinted in "Memories and Portraits."

idiom of the parish of Balweary could be a conception of the same mind. If it is a good fortune for a genius to have had such a country as Scotland for its primary stuff, this is doubly the case when there has been a certain process of detachment, of extreme secularization. Mr. Stevenson has been emancipated he is, as we may say, a Scotchman of the world. None other, I think, could have drawn with such a mixture of sympathetic and ironical observation the character of the canny young Lowlander David Balfour, a good boy but an exasperating. "Treasure Island," "The New Arabian Nights," ,"" Prince Otto," "Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," are not very directly founded on observation; but that quality comes in with extreme fineness as soon as the subject is Scotch.

I have been wondering whether there is something more than this that our author's pages would tell us about him, or whether that particular something is in the mind of an admirer, because he happens to have had other lights upon it. It has been possible for so acute a critic as Mr. William Archer to read pure high spirits and the gospel of the young man rejoicing in his strength and his matutinal cold bath between the lines of Mr. Stevenson's prose. And it is a fact that the note of a morbid sensibility is so absent from his pages, they contain so little reference to infirmity and suffering, that we feel a trick has really been played upon us on discovering by accident the actual state of the case with the writer who has indulged in the most enthusiastic allusion to the joy of existence. We must permit ourselves another mention of his personal situation, for it adds immensely to the interest of volumes through which there draws so strong a current of life to know that they are not only the work of an invalid, but have largely been written in bed, in dreary "health resorts," in the intervals of sharp attacks. There is almost nothing in them to lead us to guess this; the direct evidence, indeed, is almost all contained in the limited compass of "The Silverado Squatters." In such a case, however, it is the indirect that is the most eloquent, and I know not where to look for that, unless in the paper called "Ordered South" and its companion "As Triplex," in "Virginibus Puerisque." It is impossible to read "Ordered South" attentively without feeling that it is personal; the reflections it contains are from experience, not from fancy. The places and climates to which the invalid is carried to recover or to die are mainly beautiful, but in his heart of hearts he has to confess that they

are not beautiful for him. . . . He is like an enthu

siast leading about with him a stolid, indifferent tourist. There is some one by who is out of sympathy with the

scene, and is not moved up to the measure of the occasion; and that some one is himself.... He seems to himself to touch things with muffled hands and to see through a veil. . . . Many a white town that sits far out on the promontory, many a comely fold of wood on the mountain-side, beckons and allures his imagination day after day, and is yet as inaccessible sense of distance grows upon him wonderfully; and to his feet as the clefts and gorges of the clouds. The after some feverish efforts and the fretful uneasiness of the first few days he falls contentedly in with the . . He feels, if he is restrictions of his weakness. to be thus tenderly weaned from the passion of life, thus gradually inducted into the slumber of death, that when at last the end comes it will come quietly and fitly. . . . He will pray for Medea: when she comes, let her rejuvenate or slay.

The second of the short essays I have mentioned has a taste of mortality only because the purpose of it is to insist that the only sane behavior is to leave death and the accidents that lead to it out of our calculations. Life "is a honeymoon with us all through, and none of the longest. Small blame to us if we give our whole hearts to this glowing bride of ours"; the person who does so "makes a very different acquaintance with the world, keeps all his pulses going true and fast, and gathers impetus as he runs, until, if he be running towards anything better than wildfire, he may shoot up and become a constellation in the end." Nothing can be more deplorable than to "forego all the issues of living in a parlor with a regulated temperature." Mr. Stevenson adds that as for those whom the gods love dying young, a man dies too young at whatever age he parts with life. The testimony of "Es Triplex" to the author's own disabilities is, after all, very indirect; it consists mainly in the general protest not so much against the fact of extinction as against the theory of it. The reader only asks himself why the hero of "Travels with a Donkey," the historian of Alan Breck, should think of these things. His appreciation of the active side of life has such a note of its own that we are surprised to find that it proceeds in a considerable measure from an intimate acquaintance with the passive. It seems too anomalous that the writer who has most cherished the idea of a certain free exposure should also be the one who has been reduced most to looking for it within, and that the figures of adventurers who, at least in our literature of to-day, are the most vivid, should be the most vicarious. The truth is, of course, that, as the "Travels with a Donkey" and "An Inland Voyage" abundantly show, the author has a fund of reminiscences. He did not spend his younger years "in a parlor with a regulated temperature." A reader who happens to be aware of how much it has been his later fate to do so may be excused for finding an added source of interest-something, indeed, deeply

and constantly touching-in this association of peculiarly restrictive conditions with the vision of high spirits and romantic accidents of a kind of honorably picturesque career. Mr. Stevenson is, however, distinctly, in spite of his occasional practice of the gruesome, a frank optimist, an observer who not only loves life, but does not shrink from the responsibility of recommending it. There is a systematic brightness in him which testifies to this and which is, after all, but one of the innumerable ingenuities of patience. What is remarkable in his case is that his productions should constitute an exquisite expression, a sort of whimsical gospel, of enjoyment. The only difference between "An Inland Voyage," or "Travels with a Donkey" and "The New Arabian Nights," or "Treasure Island," or "Kidnapped," is, that in the later books the enjoyment is reflective,- though it stimulates spontaneity with singular art, whereas in the first two it is natural and, as it were, historical. These little histories - the first volumes, if I mistake not, that introduced Mr. Stevenson to lovers of good writing-abound in charming illustrations of his disposition to look at the world as a not exactly refined, but glorified, pacified Bohemia. They narrate the quest of personal adventure-on one occasion in a canoe on the Sambre and the Oise, and on another at a donkey's tail over the hills and valleys of the Cévennes. I well remember that when I read them, in their novelty, upward of ten years ago, I seemed to see the author, unknown as yet to fame, jump before my eyes into a style. His steps in literature presumably had not been many; yet he had mastered his form-it had in these cases, perhaps, more substance than his matter-and a singular air of literary experience. It partly, though not completely, explains the phenomenon, that he had already been able to write the exquisite little story of "Will of the Mill," published previously to "An Inland Voyage," and now republished in the volume of "The Merry Men"; for in "Will of the Mill" there is something exceedingly rare, poetical, and unexpected, with that most fascinating quality a work of imagination can have, a dash of alternative mystery as to its meaning, an air- the air of life itself-of half inviting, half defying, you to interpret. This brief but finished composition stood in the same relation to the usual "magazine story" that a glass of Johannisberg occupies to a draught of table d'hôte vin ordinaire.

One evening, he asked the miller where the river went. . . . "It goes out into the lowlands, and waters the great corn country, and runs through a sight of fine cities (so they say) where kings live all alone in great palaces, with a sentry walking up and down before the door. And it goes under bridges with stone

men upon them, looking down and smiling so curious at the water, and living folks leaning their elbows and on, and down through marshes and sands, until on the wall and looking over too. And then it goes on at last it falls into the sea, where the ships are that bring parrots and tobacco from the Indies."

It is impossible not to open one's eyes at such a paragraph as that, especially if one has taken a common texture for granted. Will of the Mill spends his life in the valley through which the river runs, and through which, year after year, post-chaises and wagons, and pedestrians, and once an army, "horse and foot, cannon and timbrel, drum and standard," take their way, in spite of the dreams he has once had of seeing the mysterious world, and it is not till death comes that he goes on his travels. He ends by keeping an inn, where he converses with many more initiated spirits, and though he is an amiable man, he dies a bachelor, having broken off, with more plainness than he would have used had he been less untraveled,- of course he remains sadly provincial,― his engagement to the parson's daughter. The story is in the happiest key, and suggests all kinds of things, but what does it in particular represent? The advantage of waiting, perhaps the valuable truth, that, one by one, we tide over our impatiences. There are sagacious people who hold that if one does n't answer a letter it ends by answering itself. So the sub-title of Mr. Stevenson's tale might be "The Beauty of Procrastination." If you don't indulge your curiosities your slackness itself makes at last a kind of rich element, and it comes to very much the same thing in the end. When it came to the point, poor Will had not even the curiosity to marry; and the author leaves us in stimulating doubt as to whether he judges him too selfish or only too philosophic.

I find myself speaking of Mr. Stevenson's last volume (at the moment I write) before I have spoken, in any detail, of its predecessors, which I must let pass as a sign that I lack space for a full enumeration. I may mention two more of his productions as completing the list of those that have a personal reference. "The Silverado Squatters" describes a picnicking episode, undertaken on grounds of health, on a mountain-top in California; but this free sketch, which contains a hundred humorous touches, and in the figure of Irvine. Lovelands one of Mr. Stevenson's most veracious portraits, is perhaps less vivid, as it is certainly less painful, than those other pages in which, some years ago, he commemorated the twelvemonth he spent in America - the history of a journey from New York to San Francisco in an emigrant-train, performed as the sequel to a voyage across the Atlantic in the same severe conditions. He has never

made his points better than in that half-humorous, half-tragical recital, nor given a more striking instance of his talent for reproducing the feeling of queer situations and contacts. It is much to be regretted that this little masterpiece has not been brought to light a second time, as also that he has not given the world as I believe he came very near doing- his observations in the steerage of an Atlantic liner. If, as I say, our author has a taste for the impressions of Bohemia, he has been very consistent and has not shrunk from going far afield in search of them. And as I have already been indiscreet, I may add that if it has been his fate to be converted in fact from the sardonic view of matrimony, this occurred under an influence which should have the particular sympathy of American readers. He went to California for his wife; and Mrs. Stevenson, as appears moreover by the titlepage of the work, has had a hand-evidently a light and practiced one-in "The Dynamiter," the second series, characterized by a rich extravagance, of "The New Arabian Nights." "The Silverado Squatters" is the history of a honeymoon-prosperous, it would seem, putting Irvine Lovelands aside, save for the death of dog Chuchu "in his teens, after a life so shadowed and troubled, continually shaken with alarms, and the tear of elegant sentiment permanently in his eye."

Mr. Stevenson has a theory of composition in regard to the novel, on which he is to be congratulated, as any positive and genuine conviction of this kind is vivifying so long as it is not narrow. The breath of the novelist's being is his liberty; and the incomparable virtue of the form he uses is that it lends itself to views innumerable and diverse, to every variety of illustration. There is certainly no other mold of so large a capacity. The doctrine of M. Zola himself, so meager if literally taken, is fruitful, inasmuch as in practice he romantically departs from it. Mr. Stevenson does not need to depart, his individual taste being as much to pursue the romantic as his principle is to defend it. Fortunately, in England to-day, it is not much attacked. The triumphs that are to be won in the portrayal of the strange, the improbable, the heroic, especially as these things shine from afar in the credulous eye of youth, are his strongest, most constant incentive. On one happy occasion, in relating the history of "Doctor Jekyll," he has seen them as they present themselves to a maturer vision. "Doctor Jekyll" is not a "boys' book," nor yet is "Prince Otto"; the latter, however, is not, like the former, an experiment in mystification-it is, I think, more than anything else, an experiment in style, conceived one summer's day, when the auther had

given the reins to his high appreciation of Mr. George Meredith. It is perhaps the most literary of his works, but it is not the most natural. It is one of those coquetries, as we may call them for want of a better word, which may be observed in Mr. Stevenson's activity — a kind of artful inconsequence. It is easy to believe that if his strength permitted him to be a more abundant writer he would still more frequently play this eminently literary trickthat of dodging off in a new direction-upon those who might have fancied they knew all about him. I made the reflection, in speaking of "Will of the Mill," that there is a kind of anticipatory malice in the subject of that fine story; as if the writer had intended to say to his reader, "You will never guess, from the unction with which I describe the life of a man who never stirred five miles from home, that I am destined to make my greatest hits in treating of the rovers of the deep." Even here, however, the author's characteristic irony would have come in; for the rare chances of life being what he most keeps his eye on-the uncommon belongs as much to the way the inquiring Will sticks to his doorsill as to the incident, say, of John Silver and his men, when they are dragging Jim Hawkins to his doom, hearing, in the still woods of Treasure Island, the strange hoot of the Maroon.

The novelist who leaves the extraordinary out of his account is liable to awkward confrontations, as we are compelled to reflect in this age of newspapers and of universal publicity. The next report of the next divorce case - to give an instance-shall offer us a picture of astounding combinations of circumstance and behavior, and the annals of any energetic race are rich in curious anecdote and startling example. That interesting compilation, "Vicissitudes of Families," is but a superficial record of strange accidents; the family — taken, of course, in the long piece-is, as a general thing, a catalogue of odd specimens and strong situations, and we must remember that the most singular, products are those which are not exhibited. Mr. Stevenson leaves so wide a margin for the wonderful—it impinges with easy assurance upon the text that he escapes the danger of being brought up by cases he has not allowed for. When he allows for Mr. Hyde he allows for every thing; and one feels, moreover, that even if he did not wave so gallantly the flag of the imaginary and contend that the improbable is what has most character, he would still insist that we ought to make believe. He would say we ought to make believe that the extraordinary is the best part of inte, even if it were not, and to do so because the finest feelings-suspense, daring,

decision, passion, curiosity, gallantry, eloquence, friendship - are involved in it, and it is of infinite importance that the tradition of these precious things should not perish. He would prefer, in a word, any day in the week, Alexandre Dumas to Honoré de Balzac; and it is, indeed, my impression that he prefers the author of "The Three Musketeers" to any novelist except Mr. George Meredith. I should go so far as to suspect that his ideal of the delightful work of fiction would be the adventures of Monte Cristo related by the author of "Richard Feverel." There is some magnanimity in his esteem for Alexandre Dumas, inasmuch as in "Kidnapped" he has put into a fable worthy of that inventor a fineness of grain with which Dumas never had anything to do. He makes us say, Let the tradition live, by all means, since it was delightful; but at the same time he is the cause of our perceiving afresh that a tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it. In this particular case-in"Doctor Jekyll" and "Kidnapped" Mr. Stevenson has added psychology.

"The New Arabian Nights" offers us, as the title indicates, the wonderful in the frankest, most delectable form. Partly extravagant, and partly very specious, they are the result of a very happy idea, that of placing a series of adventures which are pure adventures in the setting of contemporary English life, and relating them in the placidly ingenious tone of Scheherezade. This device is carried to perfection in "The Dynamiter," where the manner takes on more of a kind of high-flown serenity in proportion as the incidents are more "steep." In this line "The Suicide Club" is Mr. Stevenson's greatest success; and the first two pages of it, not to mention others, live in the memory. For reasons which I am conscious of not being able to represent as sufficient, I find something ineffaceably impressive-something really hauntingin the incident of Prince Florizel and Colonel Geraldine, who, one evening in March, are "driven by a sharp fall of sleet into an Oyster Bar in the immediate neighborhood of Leicester Square," and there have occasion to observe the entrance of a young man followed by a couple of commissionaires, each of whom carries a large dish of creamtarts under a cover-a young man who "pressed these confections on every one's acceptance with exaggerated courtesy." There is no effort at a picture here, but the imagination makes one of the lighted interior, the London sleet outside, the company that we guess, given the locality, and the strange politeness of the young man, leading on to circumstances stranger still. This is what may be called putting one in the mood for a story. VOL. XXXV.- 119.

But Mr. Stevenson's most brilliant stroke of that kind is the opening episode of "Treasure Island"- the arrival of the brown old seaman, with the saber-cut, at the "Admiral Benbow," and the advent, not long after, of the blind sailor, with a green shade over his eyes, who comes tapping down the road, in quest of him, with his stick. "Treasure Island" is a "boy's book," in the sense that it embodies a boy's vision of the extraordinary; but it is unique in this, and calculated to fascinate the weary mind of experience, that what we see in it is not only the ideal fable, but, as part and parcel of that, as it were, the young reader himself and his state of mind: we seem to read it over his shoulder, with an arm around his neck. It is all as perfect as a wellplayed boy's game, and nothing can exceed the spirit and skill, the humor and the openair feeling, with which the whole thing is kept at the critical pitch. It is not only a record of queer chances, but a study of young feelings; there is a moral side in it, and the figures are not puppets with vague faces. If Jim Hawkins illustrates successful daring, he does so with a delightful, rosy good-boyishness, and a conscious, modest liability to error. His luck is tremendous, but it does n't make him proud; and his manner is refreshingly provincial and human. So is that, even more, of the admirable John Silver, one of the most picturesque, and, indeed, in every way, most genially presented, villains in the whole literature of romance. He has a singularly distinct and expressive countenance, which, of course, turns out to be a grimacing mask. Never was a mask more knowingly, vividly painted. "Treasure Island" will surely become — it must already have become, and will remain — in its way a classic; thanks to this indescribable mixture of the prodigious and the human, of surprising coincidences and familiar feelings. The language in which Mr. Stevenson has chosen to tell his story is an admirable vehicle for these feelings; with its humorous braveries and quaintnesses,its echoes of old ballads and yarns, it touches all kinds of sympathetic chords.

Is "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" a work of high philosophic intention, or simply the most ingenious and irresponsible of fictions? It has the stamp of a really imaginative production, that we may take it in different ways, but I suppose it would be called the most serious of the author's tales. It deals with the relation of the baser parts of man to his nobler -of the capacity for evil that exists in the most generous natures, and it expresses these things in a fable which is a wonderfully happy invention. The subject is endlessly interesting, and rich in all sorts of provocation, and Mr.

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