MR. STEVENSON'S POETRY.* MANY of his friends and admirers, and

perhaps even Mr. Stevenson himself, believed that his achievement in verse was

by no means inconsiderable. Yet the greater public could never be induced to regard the author of Kidnapped as a poet, and resolutely refused to look upon his poems as anything but interesting experiments in rhyme. That there was an implied compliment in this neglect may fairly be upheld. They would

not call him a minor poet, and they could not call him a great one, so they would not think of him as a poet at all. Though we are far from insensible to the subtle charm which Mr.

Stevenson knew how to weave into his numbers, we cannot doubt that here, as so often, the public judged rightly. Mr. Stevenson was not a poet, and they knew it ; and he knew that they knew it, or at any rate thought it, and hence he never

approached them quite confidently or whole-heartedly when he used rhyme and measure as his medium. If anything about so remarkable an artist could be amateurish it was his verse.

But though we side with the public in holding Mr. Stevenson not to have had the real poetic gift, we admit that we cannot claim the public's happy franchise of giving no reasons for the faith that is in us. That which deems itself infallible—and public opinion certainly does that—need give no reasons for

its judgments when it speaks ex cathedra; but the mere critic must be content to take lower grounds, and to produce argu- ments and facts in support of his contentions. The attitude of " he wasn't a poet, and there's an end of it," is not for him.

No one can, of course, read Mr. Stevenson's verse and not acknowledge that at any rate he had much that goes to make up poetry. Take his power of phrase-making. Nothing could be more attractive than the way in which he clothes his thoughts with melodious words. Take the delightful poem called " The House Beautiful," which begins,—

"A naked house, a naked moor,

A shivering pool before the door,"

and so soon falls into the exquisite couplet,-

" Yet shall your ragged moor receive The incomparable pomp of eve."

"The incomparable pomp of eve," that is one of those phrases to which belong Charles Lamb's remark on Landor's eight- lined poem to Rose Aylmer,—" I lived on it for six months." The remainder of the poem is hardly lees delightful when it goes on to enumerate how the pageant of the hours and sea- sons shall enchant the house with beauty. "The cold glories of the dawn" shall be around it, while "the wizard moon" and " the army of the stars " shall add to its delights. Charm- ing, too, is the sober Puritanic ending, worthy of Vaughan, Herbert, or Quarles :—

" To make this earth, our hermitage, A cheerful and a changeful page, God's bright and intricate device Of days and seasons doth suffice."

But it was not merely in these touches of nature that Mr. Stevenson's verse was so happy. He could on occasion im- port a human interest into his poems, which was both attrac-

tive and original, or, rather, as original as anything can be in a literature like ours. We find this in the little nameless poem about the spring, which begins,—

" It is the season now to go

About the country high and low, Among the lilacs hand in hand And two by two in Fairyland."

Again, that very attractive little poem entitled "To H. F. Brown, written during a Dangerous Sickness," has lines in it

that haunt the fancy like the snatches of song in the Elizabethafi dramatists. It is in these lines, referring at once to his illness and to his desire to visit Venice, he tells us how "his serener soul did these unhappy shores patrol,"-

" And wait with an attentive ear The coming of the gondolier."

But one might cover many pages with such extracts as these. Enough has been quoted to enforce the question, What is it

• (L) The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson : Poetry. Edinburgh Edition. Prin'ed by A. Cot etebie, Edinburgh; and sold by Matto end Windue. 1495.- (2.) A Child s Garden of Verses. By R. L. Etevtn.ou. Idnetiated by Ch rims Rolineon. London: John Lane. 1/06. prevents this from being poetry, or, rather, the writer of such verse from being a poet ? We believe that the chief, perhaps the only, element of poetry which Mr. Stevenson lacks is that note of inevitability which all true poetry possesses,—the note which makes us understand what Milton meant when he spoke of-

" The Muse that lends Her nightly visitations unimplored ;" or what was in Mr. Watson's mind when he speaks of the poet- " Who finds, not fashions, his numbers."

It is this note of inevitability, again, which makes us feel that the exact thought, or rather mood, expressed by the poet has and could have no expression but in poetry,— that poetry alone would give the true emotional representa- tion of the writer's thought. Now in neither respect do we meet with this inevitability in Mr. Stevenson's verse. We feel, to begin with, most distinctly that he has fashioned, not found, his verses, and indeed his inspiration. Still more do we find the lack of inevitability when we consider whether poetry alone could have given expression to the mood of the creator. Seldom, if ever, can we say that verse, and verse alone, could have been used to represent what he desired to represent. Mr. Stevenson's poetry could not, perhaps, have been expressed better in prose, bat certainly as well. There is nothing that seems to proclaim it as poetry through and through, or as unthinkable in prose. Curiously enough, we see this even in Mr. Stevenson's most successful set of poems, A Child's Garden of Verses. The art is charming, but it is not inevitable poetry, but merely an extraordi- narily clever analysis of a child's mental attitude towards the external world set forth in a semi-dramatic form. A. prose essay would not have done the work so originally, but still it could have done it. That, however, could not be said of Wordsworth's " Ruth." Poetry, and nothing else, would there have conveyed to us the desired mood, mental and emotional.

A curious feature of Mr. Stevenson's verse which cannot fail to be noticed by any one who examines it closely and critically, is its essentially imitative character. Mr. Stevenson seems constantly to be borrowing some other bard's harp and playing on it after the original master's manner. No doubt the imitation is done with great tact and great discretion, and always with taste, but none the less the sense of imitation as opposed to originality is there. Mr. Stevenson in the attractive account which he has given us of how he formed his prose-style, narrates that he used to take some great writer—Hazlitt or Sir Thomas Browne—and then for weeks play what he calls "the sedulous ape,"—i.e, imitate till he had mastered the secret of the author's style. In prose, no doubt, Mr. Stevenson succeeded in distilling by this process a wonderful and original style of his own. In his verse the last stage does not seem to have been reached,—the stage which blends the compound into a new thing, and does away with the feeling that it is a mere unassimilated mixture. In the verse signs of " the sedulous ape" process are always cropping up. For example, lines suggestive of Herrick, Marvell, and the seventeenth-century poets are constantly occurring, while echoes of Milton, Landor, Wordsworth, and even of Emily Bronte and Mr. F. Myers, assault the ear. It would not, of course, be fair to speak as if Mr. Stevenson's verse is a mere mosaic of echoes. It is never that ; but still one is perpetually reminded of the sound of other singers' songs. Yet so well done is the work of imitation that no one with the sense of letters can fail to get a great deal of interest and delight out of Mr. Stevenson's verse, if only for this reason. Suppose we had a series of studies in oil made by Stevens the sculptor, which contained attempts to paint now in the manner of Perngino, now of Mantegna, and again of Raphael, Correggio, and Guido, and the whole fine in workmanship. We should not call them great pictures, but they would interest us profoundly, partly on account of the man who executed them, but also for their own sake.

We have based what has already been written chiefly on Mr. Stevenson's " Underwoods " and the "Songs of Travel," collected now for the first time. If, however, we take the verse where he was more or leas bound to be original—i.e., his ballads—the failure to write real poetry, or, to put it in another way, verse on the same high level as his prose, the defect which comes from the want of inevitableness is extraordinarily apparent. The nature of the form employed made it impos- sible to hide his weakness and to seek shelter in "the perfection of that inestimable art" which was his in the region of prose. Take " Ticonderoga." The subject is a magnificent one for a ballad, and the artifice and language beyond reproach ; and yet no one's blood will ever be half as much stirred by it as, say, by "Admiral Hozier's Ghost,"—a composition, judged as litera- ture, so infinitely its inferior. " Heather Ale," again, is a failure just where success might have been expected. One might have imagined Mr. Stevenson making a weird, half-magical ballad almost equal to some of the old ballads of elf-land, but somehow the result is quite stiff ; while in " Christmas at Sea" Mr. Stevenson again very palpably misses making a good sea-song. As for the Samoan ballads, one can only say that they are failures, in spite of the interesting local colour, the occasional beauty of the lines, and the capital stories they tell. They are quite readable, but they are not good ballads.

We must not leave our attempt to estimate Mr. Stevenson'e verse at its true worth without saying a word as to the ex- tremely pretty illustrated A Child's Garden of Verses, just

issued by Mr. John Lane. The pictures, which are by Mr.

Charles Robinson, are often quite charming, and never inappro- priate to the halt-elfish, half-realistic character of the verse. They are full of imagination ; but it is an imagination in keeping with the thick-coming fancies of childhood. Though not the most elaborate, we may notice for special praise the two illustrations to the poem called "Foreign Children." The tiny tail-piece of the little Indian, " Sioux or Crow," is, in its way, perfect. It is, indeed, a real relief to find the

illustrations so pleasant, for the book is after all one of rare merit. To turn its pages was almost enough to make the present writer regret that he had assailed Mr. Stevenson's claim to be poet, and to retract all he had written. But, after all, poetry is poetry, and A Child's Garden of Verses, though it shows us the working of a child's mind by a delicious artifice of baby-rhymes, is not poetry, but merely very delicate criticism and analysis. Cest magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre. Because we like poetry and because we like Mr. Stevenson's verse, we must not assume that they are one and

the same thing. No; poetry is something different from all this. Perhaps Mr. Stevenson half realised it himself when in his poem, " To the Muse," he tells us :—

" Resign the rhapsody, the dream, To men of larger reach ; Be ours the quest of a plain theme, The piety of speech.

As monkish scribes from morning break Toiled till the close of light,

Nor thought a day too long to make One line or letter bright,

We also with an ardent mind,

Time, wealth, and fame forgot, Our glory in our patience find

And skim and skim the pot.

Till last, when round the house we hear The evensong of birds, One corner of blue heaven appear In our clear well of words.

Leave, leave it then, Muse of my heart, Sans finish and sans frame, Leave unadorned by needless art The picture as it came."