there was a narrow slip of the pure æther, of a tender cowslip colour, lucid, and, as it were, the very body of heaven in its clearness; every object standing out as if etched upon the sky. The north-west end of Corstorphine Hill with its trees and rocks lay in the heart of this pure radiance, and there a wooden crane used in the quarry below was so placed as to assume the figure of a cross; there it was unmistakeable, lifted up against the crystalline sky. All three gazed at it silently. As they gazed, he gave utterance in a tremulous, gentle, and rapid voice, to what all were feeling, in the word Calvary!" The friends walked on in silence, and then turned to other things. All that evening he was very gentle and serious, speaking, as he seldom did, of divine things-of death, of sin, of eternity, of salvation; expressing his simple faith in God and his salvation.' Again, take Carlyle. In the heart of the remotest mountains rises the little kirk; the dead all slumbering round it, under their white memorial stones “in hope of a happy resurrection,"-dull wert thou, O reader, if never in any hour (say of moaning midnight, when such kirk hung spectral in the sky, and being was as if swallowed up of darkness) it spoke to thee-things unspeakable that went to thy soul's soul. Strong was he that had a church, what we can call a church; he stood thereby, though in the centre of immensities, in the conflict of eternities,' yet 'manlike towards God and man; the vague shoreless universe had become for him a firm city and dwelling which he knew.'

As against the 'Calvary' of Thackeray, and the Rembrandtesque mysticism of Carlyle, Stevenson can show nothing better than this cosmic utterance' from Pulvis et Umbra'What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in his face; a thing to set children screaming; and yet, looked at nearlier, known as his fellows know him; how surprising are his attributes!' Here we have neither spirituality, nor mysticism, nor science, but what even Stevenson's admirer, Mr. Cornford, terms a ' vision, monstrous,

vivid, intolerable, as though beheld in the refracted vision of fever,' as the utterance of a sick man in a strong access of personal emotion, curious of style, and invincibly moral or rather Calvinistic to the last extremity."

The political views of Stevenson are no more under consideration at the present moment than his religious doctrines, Whatever they may have been they were not made a prominent feature of his life, although A Footnote to History, written at Samoa, and on a subject of which his heart was full, proves that he might have made an admirable controversialist—as his brochure on Father Damien proved that he could be a bitter one. But he was totally deficient in what are generally styled 'popular sympathies.' This is shown in quite a number of passages in his Letters. Of these none is a more vehement confession of faith-or of unfaith-than the following, which occurs in a letter written to Mr. Gosse :

'Let us tell each other sad stories of the bestiality of the beast whom we feed. What he likes is the newspaper; and to me the Press is the mouth of a sewer, where lying is professed as from an university chair, and everything prurient and ignoble, and essentially dull, finds its abode and pulpit. I do not like mankind; as for respecting the race, and above all the fatuous rabble of burgesses called "the public," God save us from such irreligion that way lies disgrace and dishonour. There must be something radically wrong in me, or I would not be popular. This is perhaps a trifle stronger than my sedate and permanent opinion. Not much, I think. As for the art that we practise, I have never been able to see why its professors should be respected. They chose the primrose path; when they found it was not all primroses, but some of it thorny and much of it uphill, they began to think and to speak of themselves as holy martyrs. But a man is never martyred in any honest sense in the pursuit of his pleasure; and delirium tremens has none of the honour of the cross. We were full of the pride of life, and chose, like prostitutes, to live by a pleasure. We should be paid if we give the pleasure we pretend to give; but why should we be honoured?'

There is no doubt more or less conscious exaggerationthe exaggeration produced by the fear that he had gained the ear of the wrong people in this rather hysterical utterance. Occasionally, at all events, Stevenson took a higher view of his profession than the positively repulsive one he here professes. But his detestation of the press, although

Hence there can reader' and Ste

absolutely unreasoning and unreasonable, was genuine, and he took a cynical delight in deriding the folk that bought his books as 'the bourgeois that carries the bag,' and 'the fatuous rabble of burgesses called the "public." He saw nothing in them to command esteem, much less love. never be between the unfortunate 'general venson that confidence which existed between him and Dickens, even that confidence which exists between him and Mr. Barrie. A Window in Thrums gets nearer to humanity than the whole output of the golden art' of Stevenson, and is perhaps more assured of a place among the classics of the heart.

The time has hardly come to assign Stevenson his position in English literature. It is not easy to separate his personality from his books; perhaps it will never be quite possible to separate them. The generation of critics who knew and loved him—and could not help infusing the rapture of love into their appreciations must pass away before he can be judged in cold blood. Mr. Cornford offers a tentative estimate, which has at least negative merits. With all Stevenson's brilliant endowments and all his amazing cleverness, the sane serenely humourous vision of the great Masters is denied him. Stevenson was no "natural force let loose." Rather was he the very type of the athlete in letters, with all his powers cultivated to their utmost, informed with a rare and brave spirit running with many flourishes and tricks of pace-the race that was set before him with all his might.' This is the truth; perhaps if we supplement the criticism of Mr. Cornford by describing Stevenson as the athlete in letters who was compelled to be an invalid in life, and who made the most of himself in the circumstances permitted him by fate, practically the whole truth, so far as it has yet been told by himself and his biographers, is stated. Like all men who are egoists, but whose egoism, owing to the sweetness of their nature, is never repellent, he was his own best critic. He says, not once but a thousand times, that the view of life which dominated him was the romantic-comic. Holding this view he could not help becoming the perpetuator of the

traditions of Scott and Dumas. He can never rank with them because the most exquisite art cannot atone for the lack of abounding life. He also tells us, not once but a thousand times, that his instincts were those of a man of action and a fighter. His whole heart, his whole adventurous nature, were therefore in his stories of the type of Kidnapped and Treasure Island. He wrote the best books for boys-and the best verses for children-that can be enjoyed by grown-up people. His Alan Breck and Silver will live when the Rudyards have ceased from Kipling and the Haggards have ridden no more;' they are as assured of immortality as Rob Roy and Dugald Dalgetty, as even Athos and Porthos. Next to Stevenson's romanticism comes his diabolism the diabolism of The Master of Ballantrae, of the appalling cockney Huish in The Ebb-Tide, of Hermiston the Hanging Judge, of the whole Jekyll and Hyde business.' It was the product of a sick-bed haunted by rich fancies as well as tenanted by a frail body, and as genuine, if not quite as great, as anything in Poe.

Stevenson has not written a great novel; he died before he had completed Weir of Hermiston, which, thanks quite as much to Christina and Kirstie Elliott as to Weir himself, would in all probability have been his greatest, and might have been positively great. But he was a master of incidents' and of 'studies,' at least where the 'squalid-picturesque,' the eerie, or the diabolic masters the situation. Two generations of novelists have not produced a more effective short story than 'The Pavilion on the Links.'

As a Scottish poet, as an English critic, as a cosmopolitan moralist, Stevenson was confessedly the 'sedulous ape' of Fergusson, of Hazlitt, of Montaigne, but not the equal of any one of three, except in finish of style. As a follower of Montaigne he was the 'sedulous ape' of a 'sedulous ape.' Had not that model educationist, Pierre Eyquem Seigneur de Montaigne, made his third son learn first Latin and then Greek as if it had been his mother tongue, it is possible that the Essais would not have been a classic. Had not Stevenson educated himself, by 'sedulous aping,' to think in Browne and Montaigne, he could never, even with the

help of his very real philosophy of blood-spitting, have written Virginibus Puerisque or the Later Essays. But Stevenson had not the experience of the earlier gods, and his utterance is not so large as theirs. He sends his readers back to the classics of morality, however, and that is a distinct service to humanity.

6

Had Stevenson an influence on his time, his generation, his country? The fact that his own Samoa is German territory is an answer, the sardonic humour of which he would, if not too depressed, have himself enjoyed. The charm of his romances, full as they are of the spirit of the old Scottish adventurer whose life was one long act of expansion,' is largely responsible for the present triumph of Imperialism, although his still small voice is not at this moment heard for the roaring realis mand music hall vigour of Mr. Kipling's muse. But the be-all and the end-all, the Alpha and the Omega, of Stevenson, is style. If in youth he was the sedulous ape, and in manhood the romantic hero, he was in death the martyr, of the literary art. He made it as Carlyle made labour, a matter of conscience, of duty, of honour. He is as no other writer among his contemporaries, except Mr. Meredith, can be said to be the delight, the treasure, the glory of the connoisseurs -the honest and earnest devotees of perfection in wordsamong the reading public. His works are an 'Enquire within for the Best-written' on everything dominated by literary craftmanship. Like Carlyle, he was a reactionary in the best sense. He has created a school of style, in which Professor Raleigh and Mr. Charles Whibley are the leading professors. If at present too intolerant of the inevitable hurry of journalism, and inclined occasionally to encourage sheer euphuism, that school will yet do good service-although more probably than not it will die in the attempt-in seeking to stem the advance of the barbarians of slang and vulgarity upon nobility in thought and grace in art.

WILLIAM WALLACE.