BOOKS.

STEVENSON'S LETTERS.*

IT is always difficult to say bow a book will strike other

people, but a critic's business is to record his own impression, and, to our miLd, there are few books so interesting, so moving, and so valuable as this collection of letters. To speak first of accidentals, the volumes are beautiful, corre- sponding in size, binding, paper and type with the "Edinburgh Edition" of Stevenson's Works; and they contain two portraits from photographs, of which the latter, taken at the age of forty-three, seems the more significant, showing one of those faces where all the other features seem to be only a comment on the eyes. Secondly, and this is no accidental, but a very essential factor in the book, Mr. Colvin's part of the work could not have been better done. The notes prefixed to letters which explain allusions and introduce personages are models of brevity and relevance ; the selection has included scarcely one letter that is not of interest, and has avoided repetitions (perhaps an exception should be made for the three letters, excellent though they are, which describe to different correspondents a crossing from London to New York in a cattle-boat); and the general introduction is really a masterpiece in a disused kind, the literary portrait. One may detach from a finished whole one fragment,—this sentence, which suggests, what neither the letters nor the portrait can give, the man's gesture, his physical presence. "All this" (Mr. Colvin says, following Mr. Henley's description of Stevenson's power to "radiate talk ")—

" All this the reader should imagine as helped by the most speaking of presences : a steady penetrating fire in the wide-set eyes, a compelling power and sweetness in the smile ; courteous, waving gestures of the arms and long nervous hands, a lit cigarette generally held between the fingers ; continual rapid shiftings and pacings to and fro as he conversed ; rapid, but not flurried nor awkward, for there was a grace in his attenuated but well-carried figure."

That is admirably classical, like something out of Sallust, and all who read it will be sorry to learn that Mr. Colvin was obliged to relinquish his original intention of writing a memoir at once biographical and critical to accompany these letters. Mr. Graham Balfour, Stevenson's cousin, and the intimate of his last years, has, at the wish of his friend's

family, undertaken the biography. While reading the letters it seemed to us there was no room for such a work ; on second thoughts, there is. The history of Stevenson's life in Samoa, his dealings with the natives and with other Europeans, is not fully told here, nor in the Vailima Letters; and Mr. Balfour can tell it as an eye-witness. But for Mr. Colvin's memoir there will always be room and welcome when he finds opportunity to write it.

Yet without further assistance from any one, we can all of ns know Stevenson a great deal better than we know most of our friends. "History," some one said, "is philosophy teaching by examples"; that is far truer of fiction, since there the examples are chosen and arranged upon a finite and intelligible plan; but the best example of all is the record of a life lived in accordance with an honourable philosophy. Stevenson's philosophy may be gathered readily enough from his books ; whether his views expressed themselves directly, as in his essays, or indirectly, as in his novels, ethics was always "his veiled mistress." No writer, not even Horace or Montaigne, has put more of himself into his books, more unaisguisedly stated his own experiences ; but in giving the essential results he withheld details of the path by which

he arrived at them. Only in one essay (and that an early cnc), "Ordered South," did he refer to the fact of his own

sickness. Now, whoever chooses may read how the philosophy that he bad beat out for himself was tested in a lifetime's trial. That is the charm and the value of these letters, which ar-e not, like the classics in this kind, a record of trivial daily occurrences seen through a temperament, but rather a picture of the temperament itself. Stevenson had an odd contempt in correspondence for "sordid facts "; he was apt, when he sat down to write to a friend, just to put down a train of

thoughts ; if he adverted to the circumstances of his own life it was generally in the vaguest terms. Again and again it * The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to his Family and Friends. Selected and Edited, with Notes and Introductions, by Sidney Colvin. 2 vols. London : Methuen and Co. 125$. netsl

was to say that he had looked death between the eyes, but as to details, not a word of them. On the other hand, starting from that hint, he would deliver his views on mortality, on his

own lot and destiny in life, but far more often on life's com- pensations than its crosses. But if his correspondent had written anything that called for sympathy, whether of joy or

sorrow, there was no vagueness about the reply. Several of the letters are beautiful examples of a condolence that faces

facts resolutely,—notably a couple to Mr. James Payn on his illness. A much larger number consists of eulogy and

congratulation to friends—Mr. Gosse, Mr. Henry James, Mr. Henley, and others—upon their literary works, always accompanied with the most outspoken criticism. No man who follows literature as an art can afford to neglect these letters. Stevenson's remarks upon books, but particularly on his own works, are simply invaluable pieces of that summary criticism which an artist addresses to artists. Yet everywhere the essential interest of the stuff lies in the fascinating person- ality that makes itself felt on every page. Beyond the bio- graphical interest that attaches, for instance, to the letter which sets out Stevenson's reasons for his resolution to go and occupy with his family the Curtin& boycotted farm in 1886—a resolution from which he was with difficulty dis- suaded—beyond the beauty of many descriptions, the queer humour, often farcical, of many passages, beyond the grave and gay wisdom and the acute criticism, there is always this, —that you see the very heart of the man. It is hopeless to represent in this brief notice one-fiftieth of the phases and facets of that many-sided mind ; one can only give a few quotations as typical of what may be found almost wherever you open the volumes. Here, for instance, is the main part of a letter to Mr. Gosse written in 1880 from San Francisco, where Stevenson had been trying to live on his earnings till illness stopped the enterprise :—

" 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, Sir, 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 clearing 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 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 circumstances of the disease; and I have cause to bless God, 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 hilltop 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. Yet I felt all the time that I had done nothing to entitle me to an honourable discharge; that I had taken up many obligations and begun many friendships which I had no right to put away from me; and that for me to die was to play the cur and shirking sybarite, and desert the colours on the eve of the decisive fight."

That gives a detailed picture for once of the attacks which became so frequent (though this one was of exceptional severity) as to grow familiar, and the subsequent exhilaration of escape, here reflected, wore off and was replaced by weary annoyance. And the transition from curious satirical jesting to equally curious ethical questioning is to the last degree characteristic. Here, again, is a piece of criticism :—

"Why was Jenkin an amateur in my eyes ? You think because not amusing (I think he often was amusing). The reason is this : I never, or almost never, saw two pages of his work that I could not have put in one without the smallest loss of material. That is the only test I know of writing. If there is anywhere a thing said in two sentences that could have been as clearly and as engagingly and as forcibly said in one, then it's amateur work. There you will bring me up with old Dumas. Nay, the object of a story is tc be long, to fill up hours ; the storyteller's art of writing is to water out by continual invention, historical and technical, and yet not seem to water; seem on the other hand to practise that same art of conspicuous and declaratory condensa- tion which is the proper art of writing. That is one thing in which my stories fail : I am always cutting the flesh off their bones."

And here is a curious piece of speculation addressed to Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson from Samoa :— "There is a new something or other in the wind, which exercises me highly—anarchy—I mean, anarchism. People who (for pity's sake) commit dastardly murders very basely, die like saints and leave beautiful letters behind 'em (did you sew Valliant to his daughter? it was the New Testament over again): people whose conduct is inexplicable to me and yet their spiritual life higher than that of most. This is just what the early Christians must have seemed to the Romans. Is this then a new drive" [trieb, impulse] "among the monkeys ? Mind you, Bob, if they go on being martyred a few years more, the gross. dull, not unkindly bourgeois may get tired or ashamed or afraid to go on martyring; and the anarchists come out at the top just like the early Christians. That is, of course, they will step into power as a personnel, but God knows what they may believe when they come to do so ; it can't be stranger or more improbable than what Christianity had come to be by the same time."

What the author of The Dynamiters thought of Anarchists we know ; it is worth quoting this to illustrate the willing- ness of this remarkable mind to see the good points even in

a sect that filled him with abhorrence. But there must be an end of these extracts, which fill the reviewer with a sense of his incompetence to render in any way the varied charm of this strange and manifold temperament. There is no hint given by them, for instance, of that brilliant, nervous, impres- sionable youth that poured itself out freely,—and most readily to women ; nor any trace of the many kindly epistles of greeting and acknowledgment addressed from his exile to the younger men whose rise he saluted. One can only commend people to read and re-read the book, and the advice is scarce needed, for no man of our time has had more lovers.

Last of all, there is this to be said. We are apt to belittle the age we live in, yet Stevenson was indisputably, though un- usual, still typical of our days. The doctrine that he un- ceasingly preached of indulgence to others has been on many lips, though none have spoken it with more effect than he did; the duty of cheerfulness that he set before himself was conceived in the spirit of one who accepts the common view that it is impossible to postulate a hereafter, yet holds that the world is a good world, and was given us to be enjoyed. It seemed to him that we had enough and to spare to thank God for, even if the last gift were dissolution ; that to speak evil of the world was to be blind to the daily miracle of dawn and sunset, the daily pleasure of mere bodily action, the common heritage of aspiration and achievement. It is surely modern, the insight shown in one of his early letters to Mrs. Sitwell, which discerns not the squalor of a man who squanders a woman's money on drink, but the "perfect heaven of love" on the woman's face as, after her protest, she puts the shillings into the brute's hand. Yet with all this tenderness there is no hint of effeminacy. The man sharpens his senses to pleasure, he sits at the board of life as at a banquet ; yet there is nothing slack or luxurious in his pleasures. For a truer

metaphor, one would say that he goes through life like a man climbing a difficult and treacherous mountain, fighting every inch of his way, yet whenever he can pause to take breath, filled with exhilaration. Or, better still, dispensing with meta- phor, the truth is that this man, to whom Providence gave the barest thread of life, and only such prosperity as was won by unremitting and indomitable labour, was nevertheless humbly and sincerely grateful for his will to work and his capacity to enjoy, and throughout a lifetime mostly spent in physical prostration never lost heart, but set a shining example of fortitude and kindness.