ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1850-1894) BY ROBERT BRIDGES N HIS illuminating essay The Lantern-Bearers,' which in a very few pages seems to bear the secret of Robert Louis Stevenson's life and art, he puts the kernel of it in the sentence: "No man lives in the external truth, among salts and acids; but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied walls." If he was the most loved writer of his generation, it was because he freely gave his readers access to this warm phantasmagoric chamber. His "winning personality" is the phrase which his adimirers use oftenest to express his charm. One of the most acute of these, Mr. Henry James, has still further defined this charm as the perpetual boy, in him. He never outgrew the boy's delight in "make-believe." tells how the cardboard scenery and plays of Skelt, "A Penny Plain, 2d. Colored," which fascinated him as a boy, had given him "the very spirit of my life's enjoyment." Boy and man, all that he needed for delight was "a peg for his fancy." "I could not learn my alphabet without some suitable mise-en-scène, and had to act a business man in an office before I could sit down to my book," Burnt-cork mustachios expanded his spirit with "dignity and selfreliance. To him the burnt cork was not the significant thing, the warm delight of it. It is not the silly talk of the boys on the links, or the smelling lantern buttoned under their great-coats, a recondite pleasure," which they inhabit, that is "To find out where joy rcsides, and give it a nging," that was Stevens tor: "for to but "the hea... worth consi voice far be miss the joy any action.» for "the in biographer R. L. STEVENSON ich his triena anu passion of Stevenson's life. "To his ardent fancy," says Colvin, "the world was a theatre, glaring with the lights and bustling with the incidents of romance.» To any one looking for the reason of Stevenson's perpetual charm, - even to those who can give a score of arguments for not liking his romances, this brave spirit of youth is an adequate and satisfying motive. The young find in it a full justification for their own hopes; the middle-aged feel again the very spring and core of the energy which they have been so long disciplining and driving to the yoke of every-day effort that they have forgotten its origin; and the old find their memories alive and glowing again with the romance of youth. In sickness or in health, in comedy or tragedy, Stevenson and the 'characters he creates are never wholly unconscious of man's inalienable birthright of happiness No matter how dire his circumstances, it is a man's duty to keep looking for it, so that at the end he may say that he has not sold his birthright for a mess of pottage. "If I have faltered more or less ཤ ** ay men of a different race would surely which tha and 'fours, who were nralities, with the for new sensations, disgust. But Stevenson united the bio, preachers, given to metaphysics and the pu Stevensons, "builders of the great sea lights,» practical men of trained scientific minds and shrewd common-sense. The touch of the moral philosopher was never deeply hidden in his lightest work, which also showed the hand of the artisan in the skill of its construction. "What I want to give, what I try for, is God's moral," he once said; and 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' is a potent exhibition of it. How very early in life this temperament began to reveal itself in the craftsman, he shows in one of his essays: "All through my boyhood and youth I was known and pointed out for the pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy in my own private end, which was to learn to write. I always sejt two books in my pocket, one to read and one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with I lived with words, and what I thus wrote appropriate words. was for no ulterior use; it was written consciously for practice. It 13929 was not so much that I wished to be an author (though I wished that too), as that I had vowed that I would learn to write.» And years afterward he wrote to Colvin from Samoa: "I pass all my hours of field-work in continual converse and imaginary correspondence. I scarce pull up a weed but I invent a sentence on the matter to yourself." In his youthful reading, "some happy distinction in the style" of a book sent him at once to the imitation of it; and he confesses, "I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire, and to Obermann." All this gave him what he knew to be "the lower and less intellectual elements of the art,-the choice of the essential note and the right word"; but he also knew that "that, like it or not, is the way to learn to write." To those who say that this is not the way to be original, he has given the best answer: "It is not; nor is there any way but to be born 'so. Nor yet if you are born original, is there anything in this training that shall clip the wings of your originality." The "love of lovely words" was one of his passions. From Skerryvore to Vailima it led him and charmed him. In 'Across the Plains' he says at "None can care for literature in itself who do not take a al pleasure in the sound of names"; and notes the poetical richness and picturesqueness of many in the United States. In his Vailima Letters' he recurs again and again to the liquid beauty of the Samoan language, and names «Ulufanua»: «Did ever you hear a prettier word?" he asks. There was the ent always evident in his prose as in his verse. of • pou ic, here is If Stevenson is always spoken of as a man with a the reason for it. The spirit of the light-house builders, who knew that something more than inspiration was necessary to build a beacon that would stand up against the waves, was strong in him. From his boyhood to his death he was a conscious artificer in words. And if his books are to stand as beacons, here is the foundation of solid ,rock, here the strength of the tower. But no reader of Stevenson need be told the tower is only a stable support for the light. That is a thing of the spirit; and it glows in his works with a steady flame. With his eagerness to have a full draught of the i it was natural that Stevenson should have tro countries. The pursuit of health, 1 pressing necessity in his "great task. reason for his wanderings. He was alw a Wot the sole ingry for "the greater world; not the shoddy sham world of cities, clubs, and colleges, but 13930 the world where men still live a man's life. My imagination, which is not the least damped by the idea of having my head cut off in the bush, recoils aghast from the idea of a life like Gladstone's; and the shadow of the newspaper chills me to the bone." He looks back with more satisfaction on the things he learned in the streets while playing truant, than on what he retained of books and college lectures. "Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life. It seems a pity to sit, like the Lady of Shalott, peering into a mirror, with your back turned on all the bustle and glamour of reality." His wanderings, which were his real education, began soon after his college days. Born on November 13th, 1850, in Edinburgh, he had the usual advantages of children of thrifty people in that intellectual city. He went to private schools, and had long vacations in the East Neuk of Fife, -a country full of romance, and associated with the Balfours, his mother's family. He has given a pleasing glimpse of his vacations there in 'The Lantern-Bearers,' where he pictures the play of the boys along the cliffs, fronting on the lonely and picturesque Bass Rock, which even then to his eye of fancy still "flew the colors of King James"; and it held its fascination for him until, long years after, in Samoa, he penned one of the most imaginative chapters in 'David Balfour' to celebrate its weird associations. His career at Edinburgh University was not distinguished. But he was always about his business, "which was learning to write"; and helped to found a short-lived college magazine, which furnishes the opic for charming bit of autobiography in Memories and Portraits. Following the traditions of his family, he began to practice the practical elements of a civil engineer by working around the shops that had to do with the light-house business. Soon he declared his distaste for this vocation, telling his father that he wanted to be a writer. As a compromise he was put at the study of law when twenty-one years of age, and kept at it until he became an advocate, -"Writer to the Signet," as it is phrased in his will. His failing health drove him to the south of France in 1873: and from that time to his death, on December 3d, 1894, he followed his bent for travel; and while seeking health accumulated, in the way he best liked, the materials for his books. Barbizon and the artistic colony there held him for a time; and there he met Mrs. Osbourne, whom he married in 1879. His vagabonding had furnished him the experiences for his first book, 'An Inland Voyage' (1878), and later, 'Travels with a Donkey; and then ame his first American trip in 1879, which in after years produced. The Amateur Emigrant,' 'Across the Plains,' and 'The Silverado Squatters.' There was a period of invalidism — “the land of counterpane”—at Bournemouth, which at length drove him to seek renewed vigor by a winter in the Adirondacks (1887-8); and then he began in June 1888 his voyages on the Pacific, which culminated in his finding the home he delighted in at Apia, Samoa, in 1890. There health came to him again; and with few intervals he led an out-door life, superintending the building of his house, and working with his own hands on his plantation. The strange people, their ways and their politics, became an absorbing interest; and his 'Vailima Letters' show that his life was full to the utmost. "Do you think I have an empty life?" he wrote Colvin, "or that a man jogging to his club has so much to interest and amuse him!» He laughed at those who pitied his exile, and ascribed the occasional notes of despondency in his letters to physical depression. “I have endured some two-and-forty years without public shame, and had a good time as I did it," he wrote in a letter which he called "a gloomy ramble," which came from a twinge of "fine healthy rheumatism." These few suggestions of biography are all that need be here noted. His published works and letters are his best biography — which will be rounded out with the collection of unpublished letters and journals which Mr. Sidney Colvin, his literary executor, is engaged upon. Never was a man more frankly autobiographic in his writings; and those who have most carefully read his books need the least to complete the portrait of Stevenson's personality. The kind of judgment upon his works that Stevenson always welcomed was that of the craftsman. Whether or not you liked one kind of story better than another, did not seem to him significant. The main question with himself always was, Had he achieved the result artistically that he had in mind? He never forgot the ambition of his boyhood,-"his own private end" of learning to write. And while he is hammering away at a new work, no matter what,— of romance, travels, poem, or history,- he stops from time to time to consider whether he has really done it. When he despairs of ever getting it right, he is led on again by "that glimmer of faith (or hope) which one learns at this trade,- that somehow and some time, by perpetual staring and glowering and rewriting, order will emerge." The most useless form of criticism that can be applied to Stevenson's works is of the comparative kind, that shows how far short of certain great names he fell in certain accepted characteristics. It is easy to pile up the strong and effective literary qualities that he does not possess. But he has a right to be judged from his own plat form: what did he try to do, and did he do it? He was once asked why he did not write more pretty tales like 'Will o' the Mill,' why he had abandoned the "honey-dripping" style |