IT was the good fortune of Mr. Lloyd Osbourne to
be R. L. Stevenson's stepson; it was a more doubtful advantage that in the lifetime of that engaging author he collaborated with him in books which serious Stevensonians refused to regard as typical specimens of their hero's genius. In this view we have never concurred, holding The Wrong Box, the work over which controversy has been most acute, to be one of the most exhilarating entertainments in the whole range of modern humorous literature. That Stevenson thoroughly enjoyed writing it the preface certainly seems to make clear, while the peculiar quality of the book, as tested by comparison with those which Stevenson wrote by himself, makes it equally clear that this was a case of genuine collaboration in which the senior partner was not only assisted but influenced by his junior. If any further evidence were needed to justify this conclusion, it may be found in Mr. Lloyd Osbourne's previous volume, and still more in the very pleasant collection of short stories put forth under the title of Love the Fiddler.
• Love the Metter. By Lloyd Osbourne. London : W. Hoinennuni. Ps.).
dominated by the convention of the disastrous denouement— quite an unusually large proportion are rounded off by a
cheerful, often an unexpectedly cheerful, termination—but also for a certain boyish freshness of outlook, and their chivalrous conception of the relation of the sexes. Mr. Osbourne is not afraid of sentiment, but it stops short of
effusion. If we may give an instance, it would be the episode of the millionaire revisiting the squalid house in which he had spent his youth :— "He passed into the bedroom and stood there looking about him with the emotion a man feels on revisiting the scenes of his childhood. How small it was, how pitifully small ! His mother's room, once so spacious and lofty, had shrunk to nothing. It wasn't twelve feet square. The ceiling !—he could touch it with his hand ! The girl had followed him, and he saw her in the doorway gazing at him with those wonderful grey eyes. `My
little brother died in this room,' he said The bed stood here like this one, only it was narrower. . . . It seems like yester- day I saw him lying here in his childish finery . . . so silent . . . so still.' At least you have been spared death,' he went on, breaking the long silence. Thirty-six years ago ! He is live and I am forty-four ; . . . he had scarcely enough to eat . . . he went without grapes and things the doctor said he ought to have when he was dying ; . . . and I, God help me, I am what they call a millionaire. And yet with all my money. I cannot cross those intervening years to help him. . . he stays hungry and ill and suffering.'
As a rule, however, Mr. Osbourne plays on our feelings leviore pleetro, as, for example, in the unconventional and
dramatically rapid courtship of an English girl by an unex- pected and unknown American cousin. The opening scene— in which the hero is caught trespassing and letting off crackers on the Fourth of July in the park of his fair relative's father—is full of excellent fun, and the sequel is handled in the true spirit of modern romantic comedy. Here the hero and heroine are well matched in birth, but elsewhere Mr. Osbourne turns to effective use those curious intersections of social strata, so characteristic of American life, which some early English readers of Bret Harte found so hard to accept as true to life. One of the pleasantest of his stories is that fancifully entitled "The Golden Castaways," describing the
relations between an impecunious scribe of good connections and the family of a wealthy German parvenu. "Theirs was
a life of solitary grandeur, varied with dinner-parties to their managers and salesmen. Socially speaking, their house was a desert island, and they themselves three castaways on a golden rock, scanning the empty sea for a sail. To carry on a metaphor, I might say I was the sail and was welcomed accordingly." The parents were homely people, but Teresa, the daughter, "had arrived at obviously the turn of the Grossensteck fortunes, and might, in refine- ment and everything else, have belonged to another clay.
How often one sees that in America, the land above others of social contrast, where, in the same family, there are often three separate degrees of caste." Other variations on this theme may be found in" The Chief Engineer " and "The Awakening," the latter a charming story of a middle-aged railway clerk who volunteers for the Navy in the Spanish War, and has his liberal education completed by making the acquaint- ance of, and falling in love with, a young comrade's aunt.
The quality of the stories is unequal, and the last of all is neither attractive in subject nor distinguished in treatment.
But at his best Mr. Osbourne is a gay and engaging com- panion, with a decidedly happy gift for the humorous
delineation of the tender passion.
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