man of indifference, contentment. It is not beauty that he loves, nor pleasure that he seeks, though he may think so; his design and sufficient reward is to verify his own existence and taste the variety of human fate.' Whatever this may point to-and Mr. Cornford is as much mystified as the ordinary reader-it can hardly be J'ai vécu in the French sense, much less seeing life,' as Dickens has realised and satirised the process-through the window of a public-house parlour. Yet Mr. Graham Balfour will be well advised to dissipate the dubiety which rests on these few years. In doing so, also, he will be acting in accordance with Stevenson's own theory of the criticism of life, which is that, in the case of a genius, not only the head of gold,' but the feet of clay,'-if he have such should have justice done to them.

It is quite certain that no biography that may yet be produced of Stevenson will affect the general estimate of his character, which the reader of his Letters is practically bound to form. The impatience which has led so many writers to anticipate the enterprise contemplated by Mr. Sidney Colvin, and now to be completed by Mr. Graham Balfour, indicates that he is one of those fascinating personalities, every scrap of information as to whom is eagerly welcomed by a large and interested section of the public. His weakness as a novelist lies notoriously in his inability to draw an attractive woman. As Mr. Cornford says fantastically, 'of the passion of love he seems to have conceived imperfectly and partially, until he drew towards the end of his life, when it seems he came near to beholding some image of the true Eros.' Yet in spite of this incapacity, there was a large element of 'fundamental femininity' in Stevenson's nature; that very courage which enabled him to face and make the most of life while always in the Valley of the Shadow of Death was of that kind which men esteem most in, and perhaps too readily expect from women. It seems feeble and out of place to speak of admiring' or 'respecting' Stevenson; it does not seem out of place to speak of 'loving' him. Certainly no man of letters was so intensely loved by his contemporaries; they never speak of him except in the superlatives of passionate adoration. This fact is largely to be accounted for by the fact

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that he was a great talker. He was one of those men like Burns and (according to Mr. Froude) Carlyle, of whom admirers say that their letters are better than their books, and their talk is better than either. Mr. Colvin is one of the sanest of editors, and yet he breaks into rapture when he dilates upon Stevenson's talk.

'He would begin, no matter how, in early days often with a jest at his own absurd garments, or with the recitation in his vibrating voice and full Scottish accent of some snatch of poetry that was haunting him, or with a rhapsody of analytic delight over some minute accident of beauty or expressiveness that had struck his observation, and would have escaped that of everybody else, in man, woman, child, or external nature. And forthwith the floodgates would be opened, and the talk would stream on in endless, never importunate, flood and variety. A hundred fictitious characters would be invented, differentiated, and launched on their literary careers; a hundred ingenious problems of conduct or cases of honour would be set and solved, in a manner often quite opposed to conventional precept; romantic voyages would be planned and followed out in vision, with a thousand incidents, to all the corners of our own planet and of others; the possibilities of life and art would be illuminated with glancing search lights of bewildering range and penetration, the most sober argument alternating with the maddest freaks of fancy, high poetic eloquence with coruscations of insanely apposite slang-the earthiest jape anon shooting up into the empyrean and changing into the most ethereal fantasy-the stalest and most vulgarised forms of speech gaining brilliancy and illuminating power from some hitherto unheard of application-and all the while an atmosphere of goodwill diffusing itself from the speaker, a glow of eager benignity and affectionate laughter emanating from his presence, until everyone about him seemed to catch something of his own gift and inspiration. This sympathetic power of inspiring others was the special and distinguishing note of Stevenson's conversation. He would keep a housefull or a single companion entertained all day, and day after day and half the nights, yet never seemed to dominate the talk or to absorb it; rather he helped everyone about him to discover and to exercise unsuspected powers of their own. The point could hardly be better brought out than in a fragment which I borrow from Mr. Henley of an unpublished character-sketch of his friend: "I leave his praise in this direction (the telling of Scottish vernacular stories) to others. It is more to my purpose to note that he will discourse with you of morals, music, marbles, men, manners, metaphysics, medicine, mangold-wurzel-que scays je ?--with equal insight into essentials and equal pregnancy and felicity of utterance; and that he will stop with you to make mud pies in the first gutter, range in your company whatever heights of thought and feeling you have found accessible, and end by guiding you to altitudes far nearer the stars than you have

ever dreamed of footing it; and at the last he makes you wonder which to admire the more—his easy familiarity with the Eternal Veracities, or the brilliant flashes of imbecility with which his excursions into the Infinite are sometimes diversified. He radiates talk as the sun does light and heat; and after an evening-or a week—with him, you come forth with a sense of satisfaction in your own capacity which somehow proves superior even to the inevitable conclusion that your brilliance was but a reflection of his own, and that all the while you were only playing the part of Rubinstein's piano or Sarasate's violin.”

Ten years hence this will be accounted rhapsodical. But it is none the less genuine on that account as a reproduction of the special attraction of Stevenson's talk-an attraction which could only be done justice to by almost erotic extravagance.

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The secret of the love which Stevenson evoked, the keynote of his character, was the enthusiasm of camaraderie. He was not inspired by 'the enthusiasm of humanity.' Men in the abstract he probably disliked as much as he did the press in the concrete. He had too much insight into what Mr. Henley and Mr. Cornford term the 'squalid-picturesque' aspect of life, to have much faith in, much less to rave about the brotherhood of man' or 'the sisterhood of woman.' But he was endowed by nature as few men, and no Scotsmen of eminence have been, with the instinct for that camaraderie which is to be found in perfection in the rooms of (English, not Scottish) students, or in the cercle intime of Bohemia, and is touched with romance in the stories of the elder Dumas. It would not be quite true to say that Stevenson never ceased to be a boy; but it would not be very wide of the mark to say that he never ceased to be an undergraduate. He vainly tried to believe that he was by blood a Celt; he even whimsically imagined that he was descended from a French barber-surgeon. Be these things as they may, Stevenson had certainly much of what is commonly accounted the French temperament in him. One does not indeed conceive of him singing

'Lisette, ma Lisette,

Tu m'as trompé toujours ;
Mais vive la grisette !

Je veux, Lisette,

Boire à nos amours.

The Shorter Catechist' in him would have made any such outburst artificial. He may have enjoyed an occasional excursion into Bohemia, but he never parted with the latchkey of respectability. As a humourist he doubtless appreciated the point of what his favourite, Thomas Boston, styled a leap out of Delilah's lap into Abraham's bosom,' which used to represent in imagination at least the typical' Scotsman's rebellion against what Mr. Cornford persistently regards as the tyranny of the Kirk.' But, as at bottom a practical man and a middle-class moralist, he would have given short shrift to Delilah as a corrupter of youth, unless indeed he had been interested in the maintenance of Philistine paramountcy. But the free life of ecstasy and unconventionality symbolised by, rather than realised in, the Quartier Latin, and the literary and artistic coteries of Paris, would have been appreciated by Stevenson. He did greatly enjoy the simple pleasures of the artists' colony at Fontainebleau. When he returned from it to Edinburgh he wrote 'I was haunted last night when I was in bed by the most cold desolate reflections of my past life here. I was glad to try and think of the forest, and warm my hands at the thought of it. O, the quiet grey thickets, and the yellow butterflies, and the woodpeckers, and the outlook over the plain, as if it were over the sea! O for the good fleshly stupidity of the woods, the body conscious of itself all over and the mind forgotten, the clean air nestling next your skin as though your clothes were gossamer, the eye filled with content, the whole man happy. Whereas here it takes a pull to hold yourself together; it needs both hands and a book of stoical maxims and a sort of bitterness at the heart by way of armour.' Yet this was but mental depression caused by physical weakness. Stevenson's Gallicism, however, was superficial; his camaraderie was of the very essence of him. But it was subjective rather than objective. It depended upon men rather than places. No doubt he was a fervid patriot after a fashion. In a letter to Mr. Barrie he takes credit for himself and his correspondent there they are Scotty Scots.' Writing when ordered South' to a female friend, Mrs. Sitwell—one of the few women to whom

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he wrote as frankly as he did to many men who were not friends but only acquaintances he says 'Go South! I saw more beauty with my eyes beautifully alert in two wet windy February afternoons in Scotland, than I can see in my beautiful olive gardens and grey hills in my lone and lost estate, as the Shorter Catechism puts it somewhere.' But as a matter of fact, Scotland is not inspiring or beautiful on a wet windy February afternoon; it is at its dreariest. It may, however, have looked quite otherwise to Stevenson when he had a congenial companion with him. Here are his real sentiments in a letter from Davos to Mr. Charles Baxter, one of the closest of his friends:- A little Edinburgh gossip in Heaven's name! Ah! what would I not give to steal this evening through the big echoing college archways and away south under the street lamps to dear old Brash's, now defunct. But the old time is dead also, never to revive. It was a sad time too, but so gay and so hopeful, and we had such sport, with all our low spirits and distresses, that it looks like a lamplit fairy land behind me. O for ten Edinburgh minutes, sixpence between us, and the ever-glorious Lothian Road or dear, mystericus Leith Walk!' To the dull and uninterested stranger, The ever-glorious Lothian Road' seems one of the most prosaic of thoroughfares. As for the 'dear mysterious Leith Walk,' is it not the Rue St. Thomas de l'Enfer of Sartor Resartus and its author's 'spiritual new birth !' But seen through the haze of romantic camaraderie, both Road and Walk were doubtless all that Stevenson's fancy painted them.

Like every eminent egoist, Stevenson was a skilful letterwriter; the sedulous ape' could not have been anything else. But when he is not the comrade, the artist, or the critic, he can fail as prettily as most. Take for example a letter written from Vailima to my dear May,' a girl friend of his Bournemouth days, on her engagement. 'You remain in my mind for a good reason, having given me (in so short a time) the most delightful pleasure. I shall remember, and you must still be beautiful. The truth is you must grow more so, or you will soon be less. It is not so easy to be a flower, even when you bear a flower's name. And if I admired you so