MR. STEVENSON'S NEW STORY.*
MR. STEVENSON'S admirers may be divided into two classes, —those who like and those who do not like " The Wrong Box." The former class will declare The Wrecker one of the happiest and moat entertaining of his romances, while the latter will probably place it among his less successful books. The skeleton of the story is a tale of the sea, full of shipwreck, murder, and sudden death ; but interwoven with this narrative of the strange and fateful things that happen "to the suth- ard of the line "—that region of romance where the rules that govern this work-a-day and prosaic world of ours are over- ridden and set at naught—are a series of studies of men and manners in Paris, in Edinburgh, and in San Francisco. In these studies, Mr. Stevenson shows a power of humorous and didactic delineation which, though very different in style and manner from that of Dickens, is yet, by its freshness, • The Wrecker. By Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne. London: Cassell and Co. 1592.
its bonhomie, and its ability to hold the reader spell- bound over the most prosaic details, suggestive of Charles Dickens. Many of the characters and the incidents described are, we fully believe, destined to make an impression on the English-speaking world comparable to that produced by the creator of Mr. Micawber. Especially is this true of Pinkerton.
Mr. Stevenson has drawn in him a " type" which is charac- teristically American,—the pushing business-man, whose heart is as true and his nature as generous, as his mercantile transactions are shady, and who joins an intense love of his country, and an eager desire for culture, with a willingness to do almost anything but hurt a woman or injure a friend, in order to farther a bogus speculation or to advertise a worthless " product." Mr. Henry Adams, one of the ablest of living historians, has pointed out that the key-note of the typical American character is an intense belief and hope in regard to the future of America, and has shown how to this belief and to this hope is to be ascribed the American tendency to cat- sprawl, to bluff, to talk big, and to exalt a collection of mud huts into a city. The American is so sure of the greatness that awaits him and his, and lives so much in his speculations of the future, that the unimportant fact that the future as yet wants realisation is forgotten and put aside. But to make his dream complete, the American wants the American man of enterprise to be the cleverest, the best, the most chivalrous, as well as the richest, on the face of the earth. Hence he is for ever thinking of how " to build up the type," to get culture, and to make the American worthy of his noble heritage. This alert, eager, boisterous spirit has been caught and transferred to his pages by Mr. Stevenson with an art that is beyond admiration. Without losing a point of humour, he has contrived to paint a picture which cannot be said to be exaggerated, and which is throughout sympathetic and attractive. Even when Pinkerton is engaged in his most objectionable speculations, and is practising his worst bar- barisms and vulgarities, our hearts warm to him ; and at his worst, every woman-reader will call him " a dear," and every man " a capital good fellow at bottom." He first appears before us as an art-student in Paris, where he is hopelessly trying to become a painter, not because he has any turn for art, but because he thought his country needed more culture, and his soul burned within him to bring her the gift which would best help " to build up the type : "-
" Pinkerton's parents were from the Old Country; there, too, I incidentally gathered, he had himself been born, though it was a circumstance he seemed prone to forget. Whether he had run away, or his father had turned him out, I never fathomed ; but about the age of twelve he was thrown upon his own resources. A travelling tin-type photographer picked him up, like a haw out of a hedgerow, on a wayside in New Jersey ; took a fancy to the urchin ; carried him on with him in his wandering life ; taught him all he knew himself—to take tin-types (as well as I can make out) and doubt the Scriptures; and died at last in Ohio at the corner of a road. 'He was a grand specimen,' cried Pinkerton; I wish you could have seen him, Mr. Dodd. He had an appear ante of magnanimity that used to remind me of the patriarchs.' On the death of this random protector, the boy inherited the plant and continued the business. It was a life I could have chosen, Mr. Dodd !' he cried. I have been in all the finest scenes of that magnificent continent that we were born to be the heirs of. I wish you could see my collection of tin-types ; I wish I had them here. They were taken for my own pleasure and to be a memento ; and they show Nature in her grandest as well as her gentlest moments.' As he tramped the Western States and Terri- tories, taking tin-types, the boy was continually getting hold of books, good, bad, and indifferent, popular and abstruse, from the novels of Sylvanus Cobb to Euclid's Elements, both of which I found (to my almost equal wonder) he had managed to peruse : he was taking stock by the way, of the people, the products, and the country, with an eye unusually observant and a memory un- usually retentive ; and he was collecting for himself a body of magnanimous and semi-intellectual nonsense, which he supposed to be the natural thoughts and to contain the whole duty of the born American. To be pure-minded, to be patriotic, to get culture and money with both hands and with the same irrational fervour—these appeared to be the chief articles of his creed. In later days (not of course upon this first occasion) I would some- times ask him why ; and he had his answer pat. To build up the type!' he would cry. We're all committed to that ; we're all under bond to fulfil the American Type ! Loudon, the hope of the world is there. If we fail, like these old feudal monarchies, what is left ? '"
Pinkerton's account of his reasons for taking to art are too
good not to be given. He gave them to Loudon Dodd, his American friend, the hero of the novel, who represents the
opposite type of American humanity,—the hyper-sensitive, over-cultivated type so familiar to us in the novels of Mr. Henry James and Mr. Howells :-
"' Was it an old taste ?' I asked him, or a sudden fancy ?' = Neither, Mr. Dod3,' he admitted. Of course, I had learned in my tin-typing excursions to glory and exult in the works of God. But it wasn't that. I just said to myself, " What is most wanted in my age and country ? More culture and more art," I said ; and I chose the best place, saved my money, and came here to get them '" As may be imagined, Mr. Pinkerton does not succeed as an artist, and is soon in San Francisco helping "to build up the type " by speculating wildly in everything, from brandy to agricultural implements, and in his spare time organising picnics on a commercial basis, buying up old wrecks, and running a variety of mad enterprises with the zeal of a saint and the energy of an election agent. While Pinkerton is thus engaged, he generously invites to join him the shy, retiring Loudon Dodd, an artist to his finger-tips, and possessed with that intense horror of publicity and vulgarity which is to be found in the cultivated American who has been left on the world by the bankruptcy and death of his father. Loudon Dodd, in spite of the shame and agony which are often
occasioned him by Pinkerton's vagaries, is devoted to Pinker- ton, and Pinkerton worships Loudon Dodd, as a person of his type always worships an artist and man of cultivation. As may be imagined, the juxtaposition of the two men leads to some exceedingly humorous situations. When Loudon
Dodd arrives at San Francisco to join his friend, he finds the whole city placarded with advertisements announcing a lecture on " Student Life in Paris, Grave and Gay, by H. Loudon Dodd, the Americo-Parisienne sculptor." The "knotted horrors of Americo-Parisienne," and the huge posters with his portrait, make poor Dodd almost expire with vexation ; but finding it would break Pinkerton's heart to protest, and that he cannot get him to understand the depth of his objections—" If I had only known you disliked red lettering," was as high as he could rise—Dodd gives in, and consents to read the lecture which has been written for him by a local pressman, Harry Miller. After that, Dodd is gradually drawn into the vortex of
Pinkerton's schemes, miserably protesting, but seldom able to do so effectually, because of the latter's feelings, and of his childlike devotion to his friend. Besides, Pinkerton supports Dodd, and how could he be so unchivalrous as to wound the man who cheerfully works to help him. Dodd, however, has no desire to be an idler, and asks his friend to let him work too. This is what he gets :—
‘“ I've got it, Loudon,' Pinkerton at last replied. 'Got the idea on the Potrero cars Found I hadn't a pencil, borrowed one from the conductor, and figured on it roughly all the way in town. I saw it was the thing at last ; gives you a real show. All your talents and accomplishments come in. Here's a sketch advertisement. Just run your eye over it. "Sun, Ozone, and Music ! PINKERTON'S HEBDOMADARY PICNICS !" (That's a good, catching phrase, " hebdomadary," though it's hard to say I made a note of it when I was looking in the dictionary how to spell hectagonal. " Well, you're a boss word," I said. "Before you're very much older, I'll have you in type as long as yourself." And here it is, you see.) "Five dollars a head, and ladies free. MONSTER OLIO OF ATTRACTIONS." (How does that strike you ?) "Free luncheon under the greenwood tree. Dance on the elastic sward. Home again in the Bright Evening Hours. Manager and Honorary Steward, H. Loudon Dodd, Esq., the well-known connoisseur."' Singular how a man runs from Scylla to Charybdis ! I was so intent on securing the disappearance of a single epithet that I accepted the rest of the advertisement and all that it involved without dis- cussion. So it befell that the words well-known connoisseur' were deleted; but that H. Loudon Dodd became manager and honorary steward of Pinkerton's Hebdomadary Picnics, soon shortened, by popular consent, to The Dromedary. By eight o'clock, any Sunday morning, I was to be observed by an admiring public on the wharf. The garb and attributes of sacrifice con- sisted of a black frockcoat, rosetted, its pockets bulging with sweetmeats and inferior cigars, trousers of light blue, a silk hat like a reflector, and a varnished wand. A goody steamer guarded my one flank, panting and throbbing, flags fluttering fore and aft of her, illustrative of the Dromedary and patriotism. My other flank was covered by the ticket-office, strongly held by a trusty character of the Scots persuasion, rosetted like his superior, and smoking a cigar to mark the occasion festive. At half-past, having assured myself that all was well with the free luncheons, I lit a cigar myself, and awaited the strains of the Pioneer Band.' I had never to wait long—they were German and punctual—and by a few minutes after the half-hour I would hear them booming down street with a long military roll of drums, some score of gratuitous asses prancing at the head in bearskin hats and buckskin aprons, and conspicuous with resplendent axes. The band, of course, we paid for; but so strong is the San Franciscan passion for public masquerade, that the asses (as I say) were all gratuitous, pranced for the love of it, and cost us nothing but their luncheon."
We would willingly, had we space, quote more from the delightful half-dozen pages in which the story of the Dromedary Picnics is set forth. We must, however, leave these to be sought out by our readers. Before, however, quitting Mr. Stevenson's book, we must mention the wonderful picture of the old Scotch jerry- builder. Mr. Stevenson is always happy in Scotland, but he has seldom done any. thing better than old Uncle Adam, with his talk of " stuccy," of " plunths," of the advisability of not paying too much attention to the theory of strains, and of how Portland cement will go a long way if it is properly sanded. There is also in the book an admirably drawn "low attorney," one Bellaire, and one or two excellent sailors. Judged, how- ever, as a whole, the book is not altogether satisfactory. The character-drawing and the impressions of American and French life are excellent ; but the sensational story on which they are somewhat inartistically superimposed, though good enough as a piece of sensationalism, somehow seems out of place. Here, too, we must make a protest against the shambles business in the last chapter. It is quite unnecessarily brutal. Still, in spite of any and every defect that can be urged against it, the book is in the fullest sense a delightful one, and will give three or four hours of pure enjoyment to thousands of men and women. Those who have not yet read it are indeed to be envied, almost as much as the man who has never read Treasure Island.
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