much, and still remember you, it is not because of your face, but because you were then worthy of it, as you must still continue. Will you give my heartiest congratulations to Mr. S.? He has my admiration; he is a brave man ; when I was young, I should have run away from the sight of you pierced with the sense of my unfitness. He is more wise and manly. What a good husband he will have to be! And you-what a good wife Carry your love tenderly. I will never forgive him— or you-it is in both your hands-if the face that once gladdened my heart should be changed into one sour or sorrowful. What a person you are to give flowers! It was so I first heard of you; and now you are giving the May flower. Yes, Skerryvore has passed. But I wish you would see us in our new home on the mountain, in the middle of great woods, and looking far out over the Pacific. When Mr. S. is very rich he must bring you round the world and let you see it, and see the old gentleman and the old lady. I mean to live quite a long while yet, and my wife must do the same, or else I could'nt manage it. So you see you will have plenty of time; and it's a pity not to see the most beautiful places, and the most beautiful people moving there, and the real moon and stars overhead, instead of the fine imitations that preside over London.' Such a letter may, as one critic says, be 'full of delicate charm.' But it does not show us the real Stevenson -either the romantic in the pork pie hat or the artist in the velvet coat, but an artificial Stevenson in a frockcoat attempting to talk garden-party compliments, and doing so in babylanguage. Such a letter confirms the view of Stevenson expressed by Lady Violet Greville. 'He was a great master of style, but I doubt if he had much knowledge of feminine character.' Certainly this letter proves that he had not a profound knowledge of modern feminine character; otherwise he would hardly have treated a young woman entering upon the tolerably serious business of marriage to language almost as infantile as that his of own Child's Garden of Verses—which, by the way, he wrote at Skerryvore—

'Of speckled eggs the birdie sings

And nests among the trees;

The sailor sings of ropes and things,

In ships upon the seas.

The children sing in far Japan,

The children sing in Spain;

The organ with the organ-man
Is singing in the rain.'

With Stevenson camaraderie was a passion, and a dominating one; it expelled every other passion. That passion had its reward. He was beloved and eulogised by contemporary artists as no writer of our time, or perhaps of any time, has been. Whether all this makes for immortality is another question.

Stevenson had not only this passion for camaraderie, but he had, in a very marked, probably a unique degree, the two virtues of courage and generosity, which make camaraderie either a genuine force in life, or worth preserving in the spirits of literature. Stevenson preached courage-or to be more accurate, pluck-with much eloquence; he practised it with still more. Whether that pluck had any connection with Stevenson's physical weakness, besides being an exceedingly great compensation for it, it is for physiologists to decide. But Dr. Robertson Nicoll says, with the literary shrewdness of literal truth, To get into the depths of Stevenson's philosophy you must first bring up a little blood.' What that 'philosophy' was his Virginibus Puerisque makes absolutely clear. 'Whether we regard life as a lane leading to a dead wall-a mere bag's end, as the French say—or, whether we think of it as a vestibule or gymnasium, where we wait our turn or prepare our faculties for some noble destiny; whether we thunder in a pulpit, or pule in little atheistic poetry-books about its vanity and brevity; whether we look justly for years of health and vigour, or are about to mount into a bath-chair, as a step towards the hearse; in each and all of these views and situations there is but one conclusion possible: that a man should stop his ears against paralysing terror, and run the race that is set before him with a single mind.' Mr. Cornford very skilfully supplements this confession of faith (in stoicism) written by Stevenson when he was under thirty, with a passage from Later Essays, written when he had reached

middle-age. When the time comes that a man should go, there need be few illusions left about himself. Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much-surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed. Nor will he complain at the summons which calls a defeated soldier from the field; defeated, ay, if he were Paul or Marcus Aurelius!— but if there is still one inch of fight in his old spirit, undishonoured, the faith which sustained him in his life-long blindness and life-long disappointments, will scarce even be required in this last formality of laying down his arms. Give him a march with his old bones; there, out of the glorious suncoloured earth, out of the day and the dust and the ecstacythere goes another Faithful Failure! This 'philosophy' is clever, dazzling, but not satisfactory; it is notable mainly for what Stevenson himself terms 'maimed masterfulness.' It is at the best the philosophy of the undergraduate with his Carlylian 'hell of not getting on' in class competitions, or in the donkey-race for carrots popularly known as life. Stevenson never outgrew the heats and the hopes of the undergraduate burning for distinction,' never reached the estate of the man who, not content with being a Faithful Failure, must needs make a moral success of every moment that is allowed him by Death, not only by doing whatever his hand findeth to do with all his might, but by acting justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly, so long as he can walk at all. Stevenson stuck to his creed, and practised it to the last syllable, nay, to the last cough, of his recorded time, with a courage equal to Hood's or Heine's. Did ever man bring up blood more gaily than in a letter written to Mr. Edmund Gosse, from San Francisco, in 1880? For about six weeks I have been in utter doubt; it was a toss-up for life or death all that time; but I won the toss, and Hades went off once more discomfited. This is not the first time, nor will it be the last that I have a friendly game with that gentleman. I know he will end by cleaning me out; but the rogue is insidious, and the habit of that sort of gambling seems to be a part of my nature; it was, I suspect, too much indulged in youth; break your children of this tendency, my dear Gosse, from the first. It is, when once formed,

6

a habit more fatal than opium-I speak, as St. Paul says, like a fool. I have been very, very sick; on the verge of a galloping consumption, cold sweats, prostrating attacks of cough, sinking fits, in which I lost the power of speech, fever, and all the ugliest symptons of the disease; and I have cause to bless my wife that is to be, and one Dr. Bamford (a name the Muse repels), that I have come out of all this, and got my feet once more upon a little hill-top, with a fair prospect of life and some new desire of living. Yet I did not wish to die neither; only I felt unable to go on further with that rough horseplay of human life. A man must be pretty well to take the business in good part.' In spirit, at least, as in his ineradicable instinct for wandering, Stevenson was a modern Ulysses, and to his eternal honour be it said, he preserved his determination never to submit or yield to the last.

As Stevenson had the courage which gives backbone to camaraderie, he had undoubtedly also the generosity which alone renders it an enduring and unselfish pleasure. Some of his deliberate literary judgments are lacking in breadth and insight, notably those on Burns, Thoreau, and Whitman, in which, as he would himself have said, the middle-class prig or at least the Shorter Catechist is at the elbow of the admiring and sympathising artist. But he rejoices in the literary

successes and admires the endowments of his own contemporaries with the simple frankness with which he rattles in his pocket the hundred golden guineas' that he received for Treasure Island. New Scotty Scots' like Mr. Barrie and Mr. Crockett, he welcomes and encourages-although he mingles gentle criticism with encouragement. Of Mr. Rudyard Kipling he writes in 1890, that he is 'by far the most promising young man who has appeared since ahem!—I appeared. . . . But he alarms me by his copiousness and haste. He should shield his fire with both hands, and draw up all his strength and sweetness in one ball.' M. Paul Bourget is an excellent fellow all made of fiddlestrings and scent and intelligence; Mr. Meredith is bound for immortality.' Anthony Trollope 'is so nearly wearying you and never does.' He had little sympathy with George Eliot, yet Hats off, you understand!

-a woman of genius!' He has no sympathy with M. Zola, and urges the overthrow of 'Dagon, the Fish-God' of realism; yet he is quite capable of admiring La Débâcle. No book has recently been published which contains so much sound and kindly criticism in the form of first-class cigarette-and-camaraderie talk as Stevenson's Letters.

The Letters, and the more or less authoritative biographies of Stevenson which have been published, enable a tolerably correct estimate to be formed not only of his powers, but of his limitations as a man and-in his case, therefore as an artist. This article is, of course, not concerned with Stevenson's religious opinions, except in so far as they have a bearing on his position in letters. Mr. Graham Balfour may be able to clear up the uncertainty in which this subject is involved. All we know at present is that in one of his Letters he speaks of himself as having been almost driven into a madhouse by a damnatory creed,' that in another he alludes pathetically to the pain he inflicted upon his parents when he told them that his religious sentiments were no longer theirs, that, in this same letter, he denies being 'a horrid atheist,' and that all through his life he appears to have cherished towards avowed irreligion' a contemptuous dislike which curiously recalls that of Carlyle. It is of much more importance to note that the sense of what on one side is known in literature as 'spirituality,' and on another is known as 'cosmic emotion' is conspicuous by its absence from Stevenson's life and works. What is here meant may be best illustrated by quotations from two of the most emphatically 'Scotty Scots' of the generation which preceded Stevenson's. John Brown, one of the few Scotsmen who can as stylists, be named in the same breath with Stevenson, has told this auecdote of Thackeray. 'We cannot resist recalling one Sunday evening in December, when he was walking with two friends along the Dean Road to the west of Edinburgh-one of the noblest outlets to any city. It was a lovely evening, such a sunset as one never forgets; a rich dark bar of cloud hovered over the sun, going down behind the Highland hills, lying bathed in amethystine bloom; between this cloud and the hills