STEVENSONIANA.*

THOSE who look to Mr. Hammerton's book for a feast of anecdote and epigram will be disappointed. There is very little of either in Stevensoniana, the reason being that Louis Stevenson's faculty for incident and adventure was more imaginative than actual, and his humour was of the kind that does not readily crystallise into pointed sayings. Mr. Gosse, from whom many of the best things in the book are borrowed, has admirably and sympathetically expressed the difficulty—

even the impossibility—of recording " sayings " of Stevenson, in a passage describing the gaiety that was "a cardinal quality " in his early years :—

" A childlike mirth leaped and danced in him ; he seemed to skip upon the hills of life. He was simply bubbling with quips and jests; his inherent earnestness or passion about abstract things was incessantly relieved by jocosity ; and when he had built one of his intellectual castles in the sand, a wave of humour was certain to sweep in and destroy it. I cannot, for the life of me, recall any of his jokes; and, written down in cold blood, they might not be funny if I did. They were not wit so much as humanity, the many-sided outlook upon life."

Of the very few anecdotes that come into the book the most characteristic is the story of his juvenile attempt at " raising the deviL" He had an ingenious plan for making his cousins "see ghosts," and he enjoyed their creepy terrors. But once, after reading old books on magic, it came into his head to make on his own account a real venture into the unseen :-

" With great pains he copied the circles, the double pentagon, and the mystic symbols, drawing them about himself upon the floor, and making all his preparations carefully according to in- struction. It was at night and he was alone. And I got into the very biggest fright you can imagine,' he afterwards told his cousin lest the devil should take me at my word and really appear. I wondered how on earth I was going to get rid of him. I tell you, even now when I think of it I get hot all over.'"

Nothing happened, of course; but Stevenson got a new psychological experience which he never forgot, and which he gave the world the benefit of. That is the characteristic point of the story. Another story of childhood will serve very well as an expression of the idea one finds at work in all the writers who have contributed to this collection. " Mother," said Louis one day, "I've drawed a man. Shall I draw his soul now ?" All in turn try to draw the soul of the man Louis Stevenson, and find the task beyond them. None the less, the results of the several attempts are interesting, and they all meet in the truth, which should be obvious, that souls are not to be drawn, though they may be revealed, and that the secret of the charm of Stevenson lay in the simplicity with which he allowed his soul to reveal itself through the open windows of his many-sided outlook upon life. That is what Mr. Hammerton is driving at when he tells us how, among readers who think, the sum of the effect produced by Steven- son's "Letters" was an opinion that they were not one whit superior to his talk, and that the chief value of that effect was " to draw attention to how very good a thing good talk is, and also to bring about a realisation of how rare, in our English- speaking world, such talk is getting to be." Equally true is the remark that follows :—

" Had Stevenson been a Frenchman, and if the public to which his letters were ultimately given had been French, the discovery by that public that he was wont so spontaneously to pour himself forth in his friendships, reserving himself so little, touching so fearlessly upon all thinga of life that are near the quick, would have caused little surprise."

The thing which surprised was that it was an Englishman, or rather—more wonderful still—a Scotchman, who so "gave himself away," and a public of Englishmen and English- women who delighted in the gift. After reading a whole book of " Stevensoniana," one is naturally weary of the incessant harping upon the "Puritanism" of Stevenson, and its sup- posed incongruity with the elements of his character and genius that make directly for charm. But nowhere more appropriately than at this point comes in the question of * Stetensonicina. Edited by J. A. Hninmerton. London : Grant Richards.

net.1

the nature of Stevenson's charm and its relation- to his " Puritanism." It is so obvious that the reason why the= Scotch and English public were not shocked, but delighted, by Stevenson's bubbling candour of self-revelation was that, being bred to believe that the decency and morality of literature depended upon an excessive use of restraint and reserve, they stumbled upon the refreshing surprise of a genius so well disciplined by a long tradition of Puritanism that it could afford to cast away conventional reticence, and gambol at large without offence.

To do exactly what one likes, and be found at the last not to have done wrong, is, consciously or unconsciously, the ideal aimed at by the literary imagination of our day, and it was given to Stevenson to realise it. That is why the whole literary world is so fond of him. He realised its ideal, and then- died before the embodiment had time to harden into stereotype with an affronting moral for head-line. Had his death happened twenty years later, it would doubtless have

caused no less sorrow within the circle of his personal friends, but it would hardly have stirred the general heart to such

poignant regret. And yet there is good reason for believing that had Stevenson really lived twenty years longer, he would . have done greater work in his maturity than he did in his, youth. But the poetry of sorrow is always for the bud rather than for the matured fruit, and it is the poetry of regret that pours itself forth in tributes such -as Mr. Hammerton has gathered together. While all the " apprecia- tions" feel after the secret of Stevenson's hold on the public affection, the only writer who succeeds in condensing the secret into a nutshell is an anonymous contributor to the New York Critic :—

" To be many-sided, but not to be symmetrical, that, we are told, is the way for an author to take with these times. People must be amused, but they must also have some profit to show for their reading. They like the grotesque; but it must be highly wrought and polished, more Chinese than Gothic. They like to study the present with an eye to the future, and to speculate about the future in order to affect the present. Robert Louis . Stevenson had in a remarkable measure that combination of qualities which the times required."

When people have done wondering at the incongruity between the romance and the "Puritanism" of Stevenson, they begin to speculate about the origin of the fable of Hyde and Jekyll. Where could Stevenson have found this strange idea of the polar twins, good and evil, struggling together in the soul of one man? To Stevenson himself the idea was a familiar fact of self-consciousness, and when he was asked where he got it, he went from the point, and told simply how he got the form in which to clothe the idea. He dreamt it, and it appears that he very often dreamt the outward form of his stories:—

"On one occasion I was very hard up for money, and I felt that I had to do something. I thought and thought, and tried hard to find a subject to write about. At night I dreamed the story, not precisely as it is written, for, of course, there are always stupidities in dreams, but practically it came to me as a gift, and what makes it appear more odd is that I am quite in the habit of dreaming stories All I dreamed about Dr. Jekyll was that one man was being pressed into a cabinet, when he swallowed a drug and changed into another being. I awoke and said at once that I had found what I had been looking for so long, and before I again went to sleep, almost every detail of the story, as it stands, was clear to me. Of course, writing it was another thing."

Besides literary appreciations and critical analyses, Mr. Hammerton's book contains also many extracts which give us glimpses of Stevenson's personality at different stages of his life. Pleasantest amongst these, as well as most graphic and most touching, are the little sketches for which we have to thank Mr. Gosse. Here is his reminiscence of his very first sight of Stevenson:— "In the autumn of 1870, in company with a former school- fellow, I was in the Hebrides Our steamer, returning, called at Skye. At the pier of Portree, I think, a company came on board—' people of importance in their day' They in- vaded our vessel with a loud sound of talk. Professor Blaclde was among them, a famous _figure that calls for no description, and a voluble, shaggy man, clad in homespun, with spectacles forward upon nose, who, it was whispered to us, was Mr. Sam Bough, the Scottish Academician. There were also several engineers of prominence. At the tail of this chatty, jesting little crowd of invaders came a youth of about my own age, whose appearance, for some mysterious reason, instantly attracted me. He was tall, preternaturally lean, with longish hair, and as rest- less and questing as a spaniel. The party from Portree fairly

took possession of us ; at meals they crowded around the captain, and we common tourists sat silent, below the salt. The stories of Mackie and Sam Bough were resonant. Meanwhile, I knew not why, I watched the plain, pale lad, who took the lowest place in the privileged company."

Only a few words were exchanged between Mr. Gosse and the "plain, pale lad" that evening. And by next morning Stevenson and the engineers had left the ship. Another of Mr. Gosse's pictures shows us Stevenson at Braemar in the autumn of 1881, when Treasure Island was in progress. The weather was wild, and Stevenson under its influence had " become a wreck." Too ill to appear in the day, or even to speak, he would yet come down to dinner every evening, and, after dinner, read aloud to his friends as much of his story as he had written in the day. "I look back," writes Mr. Gosse, "to no keener intellectual pleasure than those cold nights at Braemar, with the sleet howling outside, and Louis reading his budding romance in the lamp-light, emphasising the purpler passages with lifted voice and gesticulating finger."

The saddest glimpses belong to the days of Stevenson's first visit to America, when, having rebelled against his family and cast himself out upon poverty, he dined scantily at a San Francisco coffee-house and wore garments indescribably mis- fitting. To that coffee-house many pilgrimages are now made by his admirers :—

" g Joe's coffee-house' is haunted daily by people who feel a belated and vinous grief for him. Many persons can tell pleasant stories about him—all but 'Joe,' who frankly confesses he hasn't the least remembrance of the gentleman, and wonders why people should be so keen to learn at just what table a forgotten patron used to sit."

Stevenson is perhaps better remembered at the hotel at Bathgate, where one day in 1879 the maid looked out of window while he lunched alone. Louis, feeling himself neglected, asked rebukefully what she was doing :—

"rI'm looking for my lad,' she replied. 'Is that he ?' asked Stevenson, with keener sarcasm. Weel, I've been looking for him te ray life, and I've never seen him yet,' was the response. Louis was disarmed at once, and wrote her on the spot some beautiful verses in the vernacular. They're no bad for a beginner,' she was kind enough to say when she had read them."

Mr. Hammerton has drawn his material from many sources. But'some names that might be looked for do not appear in his pages, for reasons explained in the preface. Mr. Sidney Colvin, for instance, is excused on the ground that he is engaged in writing a Life of Stevenson.