ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

BYWALTER RALEIGH

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORDAUTHOR OF'STYLE, ' 'MILTON, ' 'WORDSWORTH, ' ETC. 

_FOURTH IMPRESSION_

LONDONEDWARD ARNOLD41 & 43 MADDOX STREET, BOND STREET, W. 1906

THE GREATER PART OF THISESSAY WAS GIVEN AS A LECTUREAT THE ROYAL INSTITUTIONON THE 17TH OF MAY1895

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

When a popular writer dies, the question it has become the fashion with anervous generation to ask is the question, 'Will he live?' There was noidler question, none more hopelessly impossible and unprofitable toanswer. It is one of the many vanities of criticism to promiseimmortality to the authors that it praises, to patronise a writer withthe assurance that our great-grandchildren, whose time and tastes arethus frivolously mortgaged, will read his works with delight. But 'thereis no antidote against the opium of time, which temporally considerethall things: our fathers find their graves in our short memories, andsadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors. ' Let us make surethat our sons will care for Homer before we pledge a more distantgeneration to a newer cult. 

Nevertheless, without handling the prickly question of literaryimmortality, it is easy to recognise that the literary reputation ofRobert Louis Stevenson is made of good stuff. His fame has spread, aslasting fame is wont to do, from the few to the many. Fifteen years agohis essays and fanciful books of travel were treasured by a small anddiscerning company of admirers; long before he chanced to fell theBritish public with _Treasure Island_ and _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ hehad shown himself a delicate marksman. And although large editions arenothing, standard editions, richly furnished and complete, are worthy ofremark. Stevenson is one of the very few authors in our literary historywho have been honoured during their lifetime by the appearance of such anedition; the best of his public, it would seem, do not only wish to readhis works, but to possess them, and all of them, at the cost of manypounds, in library form. It would be easy to mention more voluminous andmore popular authors than Stevenson whose publishers could not find fivesubscribers for an adventure like this. He has made a brave beginning inthat race against Time which all must lose. 

It is not in the least necessary, after all, to fortify ourselves withthe presumed consent of our poor descendants, who may have a world ofother business to attend to, in order to establish Stevenson in theposition of a great writer. Let us leave that foolish trick to thepoliticians, who never claim that they are right--merely that they willwin at the next elections. Literary criticism has standards other thanthe suffrage; it is possible enough to say something of the literaryquality of a work that appeared yesterday. Stevenson himself wassingularly free from the vanity of fame; 'the best artist, ' he saystruly, 'is not the man who fixes his eye on posterity, but the one wholoves the practice of his art. ' He loved, if ever man did, the practiceof his art; and those who find meat and drink in the delight of watchingand appreciating the skilful practice of the literary art, will abandonthemselves to the enjoyment of his masterstrokes without teasing theirunborn and possibly illiterate posterity to answer solemn questions. Willa book live? Will a cricket match live? Perhaps not, and yet both befine achievements. 

It is not easy to estimate the loss to letters by his early death. Inthe dedication of _Prince Otto_ he says, 'Well, we will not give in thatwe are finally beaten. . . . I still mean to get my health again; I stillpurpose, by hook or crook, this book or the next, to launch amasterpiece. ' It would be a churlish or a very dainty critic who shoulddeny that he has launched masterpieces, but whether he ever launched hismasterpiece is an open question. Of the story that he was writing justbefore his death he is reported to have said that 'the goodness of itfrightened him. ' A goodness that frightened him will surely not bevisible, like Banquo's ghost, to only one pair of eyes. His greatest wasperhaps yet to come. Had Dryden died at his age, we should have had noneof the great satires; had Scott died at his age, we should have had noWaverley Novels. Dying at the height of his power, and in the full tideof thought and activity, he seems almost to have fulfilled the aspirationand unconscious prophecy of one of the early essays:

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

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

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

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

 'Say not of me, that weakly I declined The labours of my sires, and fled the sea, The towers we founded, and the lamps we lit, To play at home with paper like a child; But rather say: _In the afternoon of time_ _A strenuous family dusted from its hands_ _The sand of granite_, _and beholding far_ _Along the sounding coasts its pyramids_ _And tall memorials catch the dying sun_, _Smiled well-content_, _and to this childish task_ _Around the fire addressed its evening hours_. '

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

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

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

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

and his fancy, light and quick as a child's, made of the world around himan enchanted pleasance. The realism, as it is called, that deals onlywith the banalities and squalors of life, and weaves into the mesh of itsstory no character but would make you yawn if you passed ten minutes withhim in a railway-carriage, might well take a lesson from this man, if ithad the brains. Picture to yourself (it is not hard) an average suburbof London. The long rows of identical bilious brick houses, with theinevitable lace curtains, a symbol merely of the will and power to wash;the awful nondescript object, generally under glass, in the frontwindow--the shrine of the unknown god of art; the sombre invariablecitizen, whose garb gives no suggestion of his occupation or his tastes--aperson, it would seem, only by courtesy; the piano-organ the music of theday, and the hideous voice of the vendor of half-penny papers the musicof the night; could anything be less promising than such a row of housesfor the theatre of romance? Set a realist to walk down one of thesestreets: he will inquire about milk-bills and servants' wages, latch-keysand Sunday avocations, and come back with a tale of small meannesses andpetty respectabilities, written in the approved modern fashion. YetStevenson, it seems likely, could not pass along such a line of brickbandboxes without having his pulses set a-throbbing by the imaginativepossibilities of the place. Of his own Lieutenant Brackenbury Rich hesays:

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

It was that same evening that Prince Florizel's friend, under the name ofMr. Morris, was giving a party in one of the houses of West Kensington. In one at least of the houses of that brick wilderness human spirits werebeing tested as on an anvil, and most of them tossed aside. So also, in, _The Rajah's Diamond_, it was a quiet suburban garden that witnessed thesudden apparition of Mr. Harry Hartley and his treasures precipitatedover the wall; it was in the same garden that the Rev. Simon Rollessuddenly, to his own surprise, became a thief. A monotony of badbuilding is no doubt a bad thing, but it cannot paralyse the activitiesor frustrate the agonies of the mind of man. 

To a man with Stevenson's live and searching imagination, every work ofhuman hands became vocal with possible associations. Buildingspositively chattered to him; the little inn at Queensferry, which evenfor Scott had meant only mutton and currant jelly, with cranberries 'veraweel preserved, ' gave him the cardinal incident of _Kidnapped_. Howshould the world ever seem dull or sordid to one whom a railway-stationwould take into its confidence, to whom the very flagstones of thepavement told their story, in whose mind 'the effect of night, of anyflowing water, of lighted cities, of the peep of day, of ships, of theopen ocean, ' called up 'an army of anonymous desires and pleasures'? Tohave the 'golden-tongued Romance with serene lute' for a mistress andfamiliar is to be fortified against the assaults of tedium. 

His attitude towards the surprising and momentous gifts of life was oneprolonged passion of praise and joy. There is none of his books thatreads like the meditations of an invalid. He has the readiest sympathyfor all exhibitions of impulsive energy; his heart goes out to a sailor, and leaps into ecstasy over a generous adventurer or buccaneer. Of oneof his earlier books he says: 'From the negative point of view I flattermyself this volume has a certain stamp. Although it runs to considerablyupwards of two hundred pages, it contains not a single reference to theimbecility of God's universe, nor so much as a single hint that I couldhave made a better one myself. ' And this was an omission that he neverremedied in his later works. Indeed, his zest in life, whether lived inthe back gardens of a town or on the high seas, was so great that itseems probable the writer would have been lost had the man been doweredwith better health. 

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

says George Herbert, who, in his earlier ambitions, would fain haveruffled it with the best at the court of King James. But from Stevenson, although not only the town, but oceans and continents, beckoned him todeeds, no such wail escaped. His indomitable cheerfulness was neverembarked in the cock-boat of his own prosperity. A high and simplecourage shines through all his writings. It is supposed to be a normalhuman feeling for those who are hale to sympathize with others who are inpain. Stevenson reversed the position, and there is no braver spectaclein literature than to see him not asking others to lower their voices inhis sick-room, but raising his own voice that he may make them feel atease and avoid imposing his misfortunes on their notice. 'Once when Iwas groaning aloud with physical pain, ' he says in the essay on _Child'sPlay_, 'a young gentleman came into the room and nonchalantly inquired ifI had seen his bow and arrow. He made no account of my groans, which heaccepted, as he had to accept so much else, as a piece of theinexplicable conduct of his elders; and, like a wise young gentleman, hewould waste no wonder on the subject. ' Was there ever a passage likethis? The sympathy of the writer is wholly with the child, and thechild's absolute indifference to his own sufferings. It might have beensafely predicted that this man, should he ever attain to pathos, would befree from the facile, maudlin pathos of the hired sentimentalist. 

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

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

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

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

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

And the fact of death, which has damped and darkened the writings of somany minor poets, does not cast a pallor on his conviction. Life is ofvalue only because it can be spent, or given; and the love of God covetedthe position, and assumed mortality. If a man treasure and hug his life, one thing only is certain, that he will be robbed some day, and cut thepitiable and futile figure of one who has been saving candle-ends in ahouse that is on fire. Better than this to have a foolish spendthriftblaze and the loving cup going round. Stevenson speaks almost with apersonal envy of the conduct of the four marines of the _Wager_. Therewas no room for them in the boat, and they were left on a desert islandto a certain death. 'They were soldiers, they said, and knew well enoughit was their business to die; and as their comrades pulled away, theystood upon the beach, gave three cheers, and cried, "God bless the King!"Now, one or two of those who were in the boat escaped, against alllikelihood, to tell the story. That was a great thing for us'--even whenlife is extorted it may be given nobly, with ceremony and courtesy. Sostrong was Stevenson's admiration for heroic graces like these that inthe requiem that appears in his poems he speaks of an ordinary death asof a hearty exploit, and draws his figures from lives of adventure andtoil:

 'Under the wide and starry sky Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: _Here he lies where he longed to be_, _Home is the sailor_, _home from the sea_, _And the hunter home from the hill_. '

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

The most remarkable feature of the work he has left is its singularcombination of style and romance. It has so happened, and the accidenthas gained almost the strength of a tradition, that the most assiduousfollowers of romance have been careless stylists. They have trusted tothe efficacy of their situation and incident, and have too often caredlittle about the manner of its presentation. By an odd piece of ironystyle has been left to the cultivation of those who have little ornothing to tell. Sir Walter Scott himself, with all his splendidromantic and tragic gifts, often, in Stevenson's perfectly just phrase, 'fobs us off with languid and inarticulate twaddle. ' He wrote carelesslyand genially, and then breakfasted, and began the business of the day. But Stevenson, who had romance tingling in every vein of his body, sethimself laboriously and patiently to train his other faculty, the facultyof style. 

I. STYLE. --Let no one say that 'reading and writing comes by nature, 'unless he is prepared to be classed with the foolish burgess who said itfirst. A poet is born, not made, --so is every man, --but he is born raw. Stevenson's life was a grave devotion to the education of himself in theart of writing, 'The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne, Thassay so hard, so sharp the conquering. '

Those who deny the necessity, or decry the utility, of such an education, are generally deficient in a sense of what makes good literature--theyare 'word-deaf, ' as others are colour-blind. All writing is a kind ofword-weaving; a skilful writer will make a splendid tissue out of thediverse fibres of words. But to care for words, to select themjudiciously and lovingly, is not in the least essential to all writing, all speaking; for the sad fact is this, that most of us do our thinking, our writing, and our speaking in phrases, not in words. The work of afeeble writer is always a patchwork of phrases, some of them borrowedfrom the imperial texture of Shakespeare and Milton, others picked upfrom the rags in the street. We make our very kettle-holders of piecesof a king's carpet. How many overworn quotations from Shakespearesuddenly leap into meaning and brightness when they are seen in theircontext! 'The cry is still, "They come!"'--'More honoured in the breachthan the observance, '--the sight of these phrases in the splendour oftheir dramatic context in _Macbeth_ and _Hamlet_ casts shame upon theirdaily degraded employments. But the man of affairs has neither the timeto fashion his speech, nor the knowledge to choose his words, so heborrows his sentences ready-made, and applies them in rough haste topurposes that they do not exactly fit. Such a man inevitably repeats, like the cuckoo, monotonous catchwords, and lays his eggs of thought inthe material that has been woven into consistency by others. It is amatter of natural taste, developed and strengthened by continualpractice, to avoid being the unwitting slave of phrases. 

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

Stevenson had both these sensitive capabilities in a very high decree. His careful choice of epithet and name have even been criticised aslending to some of his narrative-writing an excessive air ofdeliberation. His daintiness of diction is best seen in his earlierwork; thereafter his writing became more vigorous and direct, fitter forits later uses, but never unillumined by felicities that cause a thrillof pleasure to the reader. Of the value of words he had the acutestappreciation. _Virginibus Puerisque_, his first book of essays, iscrowded with happy hits and subtle implications conveyed in a singleword. 'We have all heard, ' he says in one of these, 'of cities in SouthAmerica built upon the side of fiery mountains, and how, even in thistremendous neighbourhood, the inhabitants are not a jot more impressed bythe solemnity of mortal conditions than if they were delving gardens inthe greenest corner of England. ' You can feel the ground shake and seethe volcano tower above you at that word '_tremendous_ neighbourhood. 'Something of the same double reference to the original and acquiredmeanings of a word is to be found in such a phrase as 'sedateelectrician, ' for one who in a back office wields all the lights of acity; or in that description of one drawing near to death, who is spokenof as groping already with his hands 'on the face of the _impassable_. '

The likeness of this last word to a very different word, '_impassive_, 'is made to do good literary service in suggesting the sphinx-like imageof death. Sometimes, as here, this subtle sense of double meaningsalmost leads to punning. In _Across the Plains_ Stevenson narrates how abet was transacted at a railway-station, and subsequently, he supposes, '_liquidated_ at the bar. ' This is perhaps an instance of the excess ofa virtue, but it is an excess to be found plentifully in the works ofMilton. 

His loving regard for words bears good fruit in his later and morestirring works. He has a quick ear and appreciation for live phrases onthe lips of tramps, beach-combers, or Americans. In _The Beach ofFalesa_ the sea-captain who introduces the new trader to the SouthPacific island where the scene of the story is laid, gives a briefdescription of the fate of the last dealer in copra. It may serve as asingle illustration of volumes of racy, humorous, and imaginative slang;

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

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

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

There is a world of abrupt, homely talk like this to be found in thespeech of Captain Nares and of Jim Pinkerton in _The Wrecker_; and awealth of Scottish dialect, similar in effect, in _Kidnapped_, _Catriona_, and many other stories. It was a delicate ear and a sensetrained by practice that picked up these vivid turns of speech, some ofthem perhaps heard only once, and a mind given to dwell on words, thatremembered them for years, and brought them out when occasion arose. 

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

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

It was from writers of Harrington's time and later that Stevenson learnedsomething of his craft. Bunyan and Defoe should be particularlymentioned, and that later excellent worthy, Captain Charles Johnson, whocompiled the ever-memorable _Lives of Pirates and Highwaymen_. Mr. George Meredith is the chief of those very few modern writers whoseinfluence may be detected in his style. 

However it was made, and whencesoever the material or suggestionborrowed, he came by a very admirable instrument for the telling ofstories. Those touches of archaism that are so frequent with him, theslightly unusual phrasing, or unexpected inversion of the order of words, show a mind alert in its expression, and give the sting of novelty evento the commonplaces of narrative or conversation. A nimble literary tactwill work its will on the phrases of current small-talk, remoulding themnearer to the heart's desire, transforming them to its own stamp. Thiswas what Stevenson did, and the very conversations that pass between hischaracters have an air of distinction that is all his own. His books arefull of brilliant talk--talk real and convincing enough in its purportand setting, but purged of the languors and fatuities of actualcommonplace conversation. It is an enjoyment like that to be obtainedfrom a brilliant exhibition of fencing, clean and dexterous, to assist atthe talking bouts of David Balfour and Miss Grant, Captain Nares and Mr. Dodd, Alexander Mackellar and the Master of Ballantrae, Prince Otto andSir John Crabtree, or those wholly admirable pieces of special pleadingto be found in _A Lodging for the Night_ and _The Sire de Maletroit'sDoor_. But people do not talk like this in actual life--''tis true, 'tispity; and pity 'tis, 'tis true. ' They do not; in actual lifeconversation is generally so smeared and blurred with stupidities, soinvaded and dominated by the spirit of dulness, so liable to swoon intomeaninglessness, that to turn to Stevenson's books is like an escape intomountain air from the stagnant vapours of a morass. The exactreproduction of conversation as it occurs in life can only be undertakenby one whose natural dulness feels itself incommoded by wit and fancy asby a grit in the eye. Conversation is often no more than a nervous habitof body, like twiddling the thumbs, and to record each particular remarkis as much as to describe each particular twiddle. Or in its moreintellectual uses, when speech is employed, for instance, to conceal ourthoughts, how often is it a world too wide for the shrunken nudity of thethought it is meant to veil, and thrown over it, formless, flabby, andblack--like a tarpaulin! It is pleasant to see thought and feelingdressed for once in the trim, bright raiment Stevenson devises for them. 

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

If he ever fell into one of these--which may perhaps be doubted--it wasthrough too implicit a confidence in the powers of style. His openletter to the Rev. Dr. Hyde in vindication of Father Damien is perhapshis only literary mistake. It is a matchless piece of scorn andinvective, not inferior in skill to anything he ever wrote. But that itwas well done is no proof that it should have been done at all. 'Iremember Uzzah and am afraid, ' said the wise Erasmus, when he was urgedto undertake the defence of Holy Church; 'it is not every one who ispermitted to support the Ark of the Covenant. ' And the only disquietudesuggested by Stevenson's letter is a doubt whether he really has a claimto be Father Damien's defender, whether Father Damien had need of theassistance of a literary freelance. The Saint who was bitten in the handby a serpent shook it off into the fire and stood unharmed. As it was inthe Mediterranean so it was also in the Pacific, and there is somethingofficious in the intrusion of a spectator, something irrelevant in theplentiful pronouns of the first person singular to be found sprinkledover Stevenson's letter. The curse spoken in Eden, 'Upon thy belly shaltthou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life, ' surelycovered by anticipation the case of the Rev. Dr. Hyde. 

II. ROMANCE. --The faculty of romance, the greatest of the gifts showeredon Stevenson's cradle by the fairies, will suffer no course ofdevelopment; the most that can be done with it is to preserve it on fromchildhood unblemished and undiminished. It is of a piece withStevenson's romantic ability that his own childhood never ended; he couldpass back into that airy world without an effort. In his stories hisimagination worked on the old lines, but it became conscious of itsworking. And the highest note of these stories is not drama, norcharacter, but romance. In one of his essays he defines the highestachievement of romance to be the embodiment of 'character, thought, oremotion in some act or attitude that shall be remarkably striking to themind's eye. ' His essay on Victor Hugo shows how keenly conscious he wasthat narrative romance can catch and embody emotions and effects that arefor ever out of the reach of the drama proper, and of the essay orhomily, just as they are out of the reach of sculpture and painting. Now, it is precisely in these effects that the chief excellence of romanceresides; it was the discovery of a world of these effects, insusceptibleof treatment by the drama, neglected entirely by the character-novel, which constituted the Romantic revival of the end of last century. 'Theartistic result of a romance, ' says Stevenson, 'what is left upon thememory by any powerful and artistic novel, is something so complicatedand refined that it is difficult to put a name upon it, and yet somethingas simple as nature. . . . The fact is, that art is working far ahead oflanguage as well as of science, realizing for us, by all manner ofsuggestions and exaggerations, effects for which as yet we have no directname, for the reason that these effects do not enter very largely intothe necessities of life. Hence alone is that suspicion of vagueness thatoften hangs about the purpose of a romance; it is clear enough to us inthought, but we are not used to consider anything clear until we are ableto formulate it in words, and analytical language has not beensufficiently shaped to that end. ' He goes on to point out that there isan epical value about every great romance, an underlying idea, notpresentable always in abstract or critical terms, in the stories of suchmasters of pure romance as Victor Hugo and Nathaniel Hawthorne. 

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

What are the indescribable effects that romance, casting far beyondproblems of character and conduct, seeks to realise? What is the natureof the great informing, underlying idea that animates a truly greatromance--_The Bride of Lammermoor_, _Monte Cristo_, _Les Miserables_, _The Scarlet Letter_, _The Master of Ballantrae_? These questions canonly be answered by de-forming the impression given by each of theseworks to present it in the chop-logic language of philosophy. But anapproach to an answer may be made by illustration. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hawthorne used this idea in one of his sketches. 

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

M. Bourget, the French romancer, has made use of this idea in his novelcalled _Le Disciple_. Only it is not a slave, but a young girl whom hepretends to love, that is the subject of the moral philosopher'sexperiment; and a noisy war has been waged round the book in France. Hawthorne would plainly have seized the romantic essence of the idea andwould have avoided the boneyard of 'problem morality. '

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

This is the device that gives fascination to the figures of Richelieu in_Marion Delorme_, and of Captain Flint in _Treasure Island_. 

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

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

Stevenson's work is a gallery of romantic effects that haunt the memory. Some of these are directly pictorial: the fight in the round-house onboard the brig _Covenant_; the duel between the two brothers ofBallantrae in the island of light thrown up by the candles from thatabyss of windless night; the flight of the Princess Seraphina through thedark mazes of the wood, --all these, although they carry with themsubtleties beyond the painter's art, yet have something of picture inthem. But others make entrance to the corridors of the mind by blind andsecret ways, and there awaken the echoes of primaeval fear. The cry ofthe parrot--'Pieces of eight'--the tapping of the stick of the blindpirate Pew as he draws near the inn-parlour, and the similar effects ofinexplicable terror wrought by the introduction of the blind catechist in_Kidnapped_, and of the disguise of a blind leper in _The Black Arrow_, are beyond the reach of any but the literary form of romantic art. Thelast appearance of Pew, in the play of _Admiral Guinea_, written incollaboration with Mr. W. E. Henley, is perhaps the masterpiece of allthe scenes of terror. The blind ruffian's scream of panic fear, when heputs his groping hand into the burning flame of the candle in the roomwhere he believed that he was unseen, and so realises that his everymovement is being silently watched, is indeed 'the horrors come alive. '

The animating principle or idea of Stevenson's longer stories is never tobe found in their plot, which is generally built carelessly anddisjointedly enough around the central romantic situation or conception. The main situation in _The Wrecker_ is a splendid product of romanticaspiration, but the structure of the story is incoherent and ineffective, so that some of the best passages in the book--the scenes in Paris, forinstance--have no business there at all. The story in _Kidnapped_ and_Catriona_ wanders on in a single thread, like the pageant of a dream, and the reader feels and sympathises with the author's obvious difficultyin leading it back to the scene of the trial and execution of JamesStewart. _The Master of Ballantrae_ is stamped with a magnificent unityof conception, but the story illuminates that conception by a series ofscattered episodes. 

That lurid embodiment of fascinating evil, part vampire, partMephistopheles, whose grand manner and heroic abilities might have madehim a great and good man but for 'the malady of not wanting, ' is thelight and meaning of the whole book. Innocent and benevolent lives arethrown in his way that he may mock or distort or shatter them. Stevensonnever came nearer than in this character to the sublime of power. 

But an informing principle of unity is more readily to be apprehended inthe shorter stories, and it is a unity not so much of plot as ofimpression and atmosphere. His islands, whether situated in the Pacificor off the coast of Scotland, have each of them a climate of its own, andthe character of the place seems to impose itself on the incidents thatoccur, dictating subordination or contrast. The events that happenwithin the limits of one of these magic isles could in every case be cutoff from the rest of the story and framed as a separate work of art. Thelong starvation of David Balfour on the island of Earraid, the sharks ofcrime and monsters of blasphemy that break the peace of the shiningtropical lagoons in _Treasure Island_ and _The Ebb Tide_, the captivityon the Bass Rock in _Catriona_, the supernatural terrors that hover andmutter over the island of _The Merry Men_--these imaginations are plainlygenerated by the scenery against which they are thrown; each is in somesort the genius of the place it inhabits. 

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

When he is handling the superstitions of the Scottish people, he allowshis humorous enjoyment of their extravagance to peep out from behind thesolemn dialect in which they are dressed. The brief tale of _ThrawnJanet_, and Black Andy's story of Tod Lapraik in _Catriona_, aregrotesque imaginations of the school of _Tam o' Shanter_ rather than ofthe school of Shakespeare, who deals in no comedy ghosts. They areturnip-lanterns swayed by a laughing urchin, proud of the fears he canawaken. Even _The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ and the storyof _The Bottle Imp_ are manufactured bogeys, that work on the nerves andnot on the heart, whatever may be said by those who insist on seeingallegory in what is only dream-fantasy. The supernatural must be rooteddeeper than these in life and experience if it is to reach an imposingstature: the true ghost is the shadow of a man. And Stevenson shows asense of this in two of his very finest stories, the exquisite idyll of_Will o' the Mill_ and the grim history of _Markheim_. Each of thesestories is the work of a poet, by no means of a goblin-fancier. Thepersonification of Death is as old as poetry; it is wrought with movinggentleness in that last scene in the arbour of Will's inn. The waftedscent of the heliotropes, which had never been planted in the gardensince Marjory's death, the light in the room that had been hers, preludethe arrival at the gate of the stranger's carriage, with the black pinetops standing above it like plumes. And Will o' the Mill makes theacquaintance of his physician and friend, and goes at last upon histravels. In the other story, Markheim meets with his own double in thehouse of the dealer in curiosities, whom he has murdered. It is not sucha double as Rossetti prayed for to the god of Sleep:

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

but a clear-eyed critic of the murderer, not unfriendly, who lays barebefore him his motives and history. At the close of that wonderfulconversation, one of the most brilliant of its author's achievements, Markheim gives himself into the hands of the police. These two stories, when compared with the others, serve to show how Stevenson's imaginationquickened and strengthened when it played full upon life. For his bestromantic effects, like all great romance, are illuminative of life, andno mere idle games. 

III. MORALITY. --His genius, like the genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne, wasdoubly rich in the spirit of romance and in a wise and beautifulmorality. But the irresponsible caprices of his narrative fancyprevented his tales from being the appropriate vehicles of his morality. He has left no work--unless the two short stories mentioned above beregarded as exceptions--in which romance and morality are welded into asingle perfect whole, nothing that can be put beside _The Scarlet Letter_or _The Marble Faun_ for deep insight and magic fancy joined in one. Hence his essays, containing as they do the gist of his reflectivewisdom, are ranked by some critics above his stories. 

A novel cannot, of course, be moral as an action is moral; there is noquestion in art of police regulations or conformity to established codes, but rather of insight both deep and wide. Polygamy and monogamy, suttee, thuggism, and cannibalism, are all acceptable to the romancer, whosebusiness is with the heart of a man in all times and places. He is notbound to display allegiance to particular moral laws of the kind that canbe broken; he is bound to show his consciousness of that wider moralorder which can no more be broken by crime than the law of gravitationcan be broken by the fall of china--the morality without which life wouldbe impossible; the relations, namely, of human beings to each other, thefeelings, habits, and thoughts that are the web of society. For theappreciation of morality in this wider sense high gifts of imaginationare necessary. Shakespeare could never have drawn Macbeth, and therebymade apparent the awfulness of murder, without some sympathy for themurderer--the sympathy of intelligence. These gifts of imagination andsympathy belong to Stevenson in a very high degree; in all his romancesthere are gleams from time to time of wise and subtle reflection uponlife, from the eternal side of things, which shine the more luminouslythat they spring from the events and situations with no suspicion ofhomily. In _The Black Arrow_, Dick Shelton begs from the Duke ofGloucester the life of the old shipmaster Arblaster, whose ship he hadtaken and accidentally wrecked earlier in the story. The Duke ofGloucester, who, in his own words, 'loves not mercy nor mercy-mongers, 'yields the favour reluctantly. Then Dick turns to Arblaster. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The wide outlook on humanity that expresses itself in passages like theseis combined in Stevenson with a vivid interest in, and quick appreciationof, character. The variety of the characters that he has essayed to drawis enormous, and his successes, for the purposes of his stories, aremany. Yet with all this, the number of lifelike portraits, true to ahair, that are to be found in his works is very small indeed. In thegolden glow of romance, character is always subject to be idealised; itis the effect of character seen at particular angles and in speciallights, natural or artificial, that Stevenson paints; he does not attemptto analyse the complexity of its elements, but boldly projects into itcertain principles, and works from those. It has often been said ofScott that he could not draw a lady who was young and beautiful; theglamour of chivalry blinded him, he lowered his eyes and described hisemotions and aspirations. Something of the same disability afflictedStevenson in the presence of a ruffian. He loved heroic vice only lessthan he loved heroic virtue, and was always ready to idealise hisvillains, to make of them men who, like the Master of Ballantrae, 'livedfor an idea. ' Even the low and lesser villainy of Israel Hands, in thegreat scene where he climbs the mast to murder the hero of _TreasureIsland_, breathes out its soul in a creed:

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

John Silver, that memorable pirate, with a face like a ham and an eyelike a fragment of glass stuck into it, leads a career of wholeheartedcrime that can only be described as sparkling. His unalloyed maleficenceis adorned with a thousand graces of manner. Into the dark and fetidmarsh that is an evil heart, where low forms of sentiency are hardlydistinguishable from the all-pervading mud, Stevenson never peered, unless it were in the study of Huish in _The Ebb Tide_. 

Of his women, let women speak. They are traditionally accredited with anintuition of one another's hearts, although why, if woman was created forman, as the Scriptures assure us, the impression that she makes on himshould not count for as much as the impression she makes on some otherwoman, is a question that cries for solution. Perhaps the answer is thatdisinterested curiosity, which is one means of approach to the knowledgeof character, although only one, is a rare attitude for man to assumetowards the other sex. Stevenson's curiosity was late in awaking; theheroine of _The Black Arrow_ is dressed in boy's clothes throughout thecourse of the story, and the novelist thus saved the trouble ofdescribing the demeanour of a girl. Mrs. Henry, in _The Master ofBallantrae_, is a charming veiled figure, drawn in the shadow; MissBarbara Grant and Catriona in the continuation of _Kidnapped_ are realenough to have made many suitors for their respective hands among malereaders of the book;--but that is nothing, reply the critics of the otherparty: a walking doll will find suitors. The question must stand overuntil some definite principles of criticism have been discovered to guideus among these perilous passes. 

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

The highest ambitions of a novelist are not easily attainable. Tocombine incident, character, and romance in a uniform whole, to alternatetelling dramatic situation with effects of poetry and suggestion, tobreathe into the entire conception a profound wisdom, construct it withabsolute unity, and express it in perfect style, --this thing has neveryet been done. A great part of Stevenson's subtle wisdom of life findsits readiest outlet in his essays. In these, whatever their occasion, heshows himself the clearest-eyed critic of human life, never the dupe ofthe phrases and pretences, the theories and conventions, that distort thevision of most writers and thinkers. He has an unerring instinct forrealities, and brushes aside all else with rapid grace. In his latelypublished _Amateur Emigrant_ he describes one of his fellow-passengers toAmerica:

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

This sense of the realities of the world, --laughter, happiness, thesimple emotions of childhood, and others, --makes Stevenson an admirablecritic of those social pretences that ape the native qualities of theheart. The criticism on organised philanthropy contained in the essay on_Beggars_ is not exhaustive, it is expressed paradoxically, but is ituntrue?

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

An equal sense of the realities of life and death gives the force of anatural law to the pathos of _Old Mortality_, that essay in whichStevenson pays passionate tribute to the memory of his early friend, who'had gone to ruin with a kingly abandon, like one who condescended; butonce ruined, with the lights all out, he fought as for a kingdom. ' Thewhole description, down to the marvellous quotation from Bunyan thatcloses it, is one of the sovereign passages of modern literature; thepathos of it is pure and elemental, like the rush of a cleansing wind, orthe onset of the legions commanded by

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

Lastly, to bring to an end this imperfect review of the works of a writerwho has left none greater behind him, Stevenson excels at what is perhapsthe most delicate of literary tasks and the utmost test, where it issuccessfully encountered, of nobility, --the practice, namely, of self-revelation and self-delineation. To talk much about oneself with detail, composure, and ease, with no shadow of hypocrisy and no whiff or taint ofindecent familiarity, no puling and no posing, --the shores of the sea ofliterature are strewn with the wrecks and forlorn properties of those whohave adventured on this dangerous attempt. But a criticism of Stevensonis happy in this, that from the writer it can pass with perfect trust andperfect fluency to the man. He shares with Goldsmith and Montaigne, hisown favourite, the happy privilege of making lovers among his readers. 'To be the most beloved of English writers--what a title that is for aman!' says Thackeray of Goldsmith. In such matters, a dispute for pre-eminence in the captivation of hearts would be unseemly; it is enough tosay that Stevenson too has his lovers among those who have accompaniedhim on his _Inland Voyage_, or through the fastnesses of the Cevennes inthe wake of Modestine. He is loved by those that never saw his face; andone who has sealed that dizzy height of ambition may well be content, without the impertinent assurance that, when the Japanese have takenLondon and revised the contents of the British Museum, the yellow scribeswhom they shall set to produce a new edition of the _BiographieUniverselle_ will include in their entries the followingitem:--'_Stevenson_, _R. L. _ _A prolific writer of stories among theaborigines_. _Flourished before the Coming of the Japanese_. _His worksare lost_. '

THE END

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