thedral light through it. We saw a green pigeon-sitting solitary in a great redblossoming cotton-tree-which had all the colors of a bird in a stained-glass window. A little later, again, there stood out ahead of us another big tree whose boughs were yet bare from the winter, but packed with egrets so that it seemed to have burst into white blossoms in the dim light. As we went on, the jungle opened out into glades that held tangles of dog-rose and wild plum, and grassy hollows, and little shallow meres where water-birds were beginning to sleep.

And the Collector began to say that it was no good going further. Already Blackwood's Magazine.

it was far too late for the peafowl. We shouldn't be able to see them soon if we heard any, and we hadn't heard any yet; after which, silently condemning the Patwari, we turned the elephant. As we turned there came from the copse we had been about to enter a mocking and hideous sound-just the sort of sound the Patwari, if he had lived in that jungle, a wizard and diviner of thoughts, would have given vent to at just that moment. An immense sustained bray, followed by a flapping noise that grew fainter and fainter as the flapper receded into the jungle. It was the peacock.

R. E. Vernede.

It is now twelve years since the publication of Stevenson's "Letters to his Family and Friends." Editions of both these and of the "Vailima Letters" have kept multiplying since. As a natural and desirable consequence, therefore, these four handy and alluring little volumes are now published, containing the whole of Stevenson's correspondence, except merely what is of too slight or personal a nature for inclusion. And all has been lucidly rearranged in a chronological series. These volumes form, says Sir Sidney Colvin in his introduction, "a definite edition-constitute in effect a nearly complete autobiography." Of new letters-besides four delightfully graphic contributions from Mrs. Stevenson, including a glowing description of a Feast of Friendship in Tahiti-there are a hundred and fifty. A good many of these were written in Stevenson's earlier days; but no after-year of his life, up to the last in Vailima, is left unrepresented by something hith

"The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson." Edited by Sidney Colvin. Four volumes. (Methuen. 58. net each.)

erto unpublished. This new matter in itself, indeed, forms a collection of unusual vivacity and richness, and gives a fairly complete presentation of a vivid and protean personality. A mind like Stevenson's had no need to be niggardly.

books.

He did not "save up" for his

He could sit down at evening and empty his cruse into any letter that was going, and morning would find it overflowingly renewed again. None the less, his friends were sometimes tempted to think him an indifferent and dilatory correspondent. But who in the world so much addicted to haste, indifference, formality, and commonplace would not hunger rather incontinently for news that was always transfigured by the imagination and zest of the writer, and for confidences never failing in sincerity and warmth! Apart from this, these closely packed hundreds of pages are Stevenson's overwhelming vindication against any such charge. When his health and the extent of his literary industry, and his unflagging punctilio over it, are taken into account, his familiar letters

-in bulk and range and variety-stand out as the most remarkable accomplishment of a life that, amid acute difficulties, accomplished so much.

It takes two people to make any kind of letter worth keeping, or at any rate worth sharing-two temperaments, two points of view, two mutually attracting and conflicting affections. It is the Are and the Vale of a letter that make its complex harmony. Sender and recipient are its North and South. Round and round the needle may spin and double, glancing into every region of the complete circle of human interests, but its ultimate point of rest is set dead between I and Thou. Charged fullest with immortal spirit are the letters in which the wits and hearts and experiences of two minds, rich and warm and various and keen, are as inextricably interfused as the lights in a fabric shot with two delightful colors, answering each to each as nightingale to the lutanist in "Music's Duel." Letters of close friendship are likelier to yield the finest harvest-for love-letters, pure and simple, when the first rapture of Darien is over, have an almost inevitable tendency to stray out of the thronging world into a paradise of delights whose atmosphere is a little too rare for ordinary lungs. all these pages there is not one loveletter. A not particularly engaging curiosity may deplore the omission. Good sense and good feeling can do nothing but rejoice at it. Letters, on the other hand, written with even the faintest conscious thought of eventual publication, lose a charm and appeal more essential than anything they gain in range or literary merit. The writer puts on conventionality. He sits in his singing robes, he realizes the virtue of restraint, and is apt to become that amorphous composite creature, the popular author, who to some extent must be all things to all the libraries. Stevenson was far too much himself to LIVING AGE. VOL. LII. 2712

In

write impersonally for long, but in his correspondence from Samoa with Sir Sidney Colvin, the phantom of the general reader at times slipped into his mind; he becomes a little formal even in informality, and dots his i's even when he does not seem to be more than naturally anxious over his p's and q's. But by far the most part of the letters in this collection are the best kind of all-free and impulsive outpourings of thought and feeling at the service of friendship, and in many cases of almost life-long friendship. It is personality that makes friends-not necessarily a very profound or great or fine, but invariably a magnetic, personality; it is character that has some share in keeping them. Intensely individual, Stevenson had yet a chameleonic temperament. He had the gift of being the friend he was writing to. As a child's face tinily mimics the features it is watching with absorbed interest, so his insight served him. He kept, too, throughout his life an undiminishing zest for all its chances and changes, was in heart and mind most youthful when experience had brought him knowledge for bosom friend to intuition; and not least was consummate master of his pen.

Never, through all weariness and disillusionment, to weary of oneself is the secret of never really wearying others. For, after all, oneself, in any tolerable meaning of the term, can never be pure intellect, nor a vessel of undiluted vanity, whey, and commonplace. It was Stevenson's boast that he had never been bored in his life. He made up his mind not to be. When heart and mood began to flag he set eyes and wits to work. If Pegasus faltered, he had to answer to the spur -anything rather than that the steed should forget that it was winged, "I begin to grow .. a little sharp, I fear," he writes somewhere, "and a little close and unfriendly. . There

are not sadder people in the world than I." But the mood from which a confession so dismal as that springs need not be anything else than the pause of a pendulum that is already on the turn towards Eureka.

Egotist Stevenson undoubtedly was. But his was an egotism of a singular fascination. It could be as naif as a

Song of Innocence:

Come live and be merry and join with

me

To sing the sweet chorus of ha, ha, he! It could be almost as turbid and tortured and introspective as Sir Willoughby's. In these new letters are occasional passages-moralistic, confessional-wherein we see the writer standing obviously a little dazzled in his own limelight. "I was weary at my resemblances to Shelley," comes with something of a shock. His elaborate account of an apology (that took days to ripen) for a rudeness to a servant:-"Let us hope I shall never be such a cad any more as to be ashamed of being a gentleman"; or again, "My position is pretty. Yes, I am an aristocrat. I have the old petty personal view of honor. I should blush till I die if I do this; yet it is on the cards that I may do it"-such confessions, confessing rather more than was intended, sprang unconsciously from a mind intensely interested in itself, ruthlessly and restlessly busy with its own workings. Being rare, they add only one more facet to a temperament reflecting every color of the rainbow. At its most naif this lively self-interest is one of the secrets of Stevenson's wonderful charm-his apparently chastened but really bubbling delight in such a piece of portraiture, for instance, as a friend's "Mais, c'est que vous êtes tout simplement enfant," and in the trophy triumphantly extorted from a sagacious verger in Chester Cathedral, "There's a good deal in that head."

Stevenson was heart and soul a "lantern-bearer." He was, that is, that most forgivable of all egotists, the dramatic. He walked through life, and thought through life, companioned by a second self which he never wearied of watching in all its manifestations, which could be any kind of romantic figure that human nature has evolved-pirate and muffin-man, chieftain and exile, pilgrim, poet, and bohemian. Even his published prayers suggest that their writer had sat in fancy elbow to elbow with the translators of the Bible. "Give us to awake with smiles, give us to labor smiling; as the sun lightens the world, so let our loving-kindness make bright the house of Our habitation." Whether life changes any man fundamentally is just a question. We talk about growing up, but the oak is only the sapling come to maturity, and childhood is a haven of refuge at the end, as it was a porch out into wonder at the beginning. Changeable as the moon, mind and body pass through their destined phases. And "old lamps for new" is for mortality an impossible, even if it be a desirable, exchange. In Stevenson's case, at any rate, life's waves passed over a head most resolutely "unbowed." He never followed the ruck, he never kow-towed to circumstance; he looked it in the face and set long dextrous fingers to work coloring and caricaturing.

Immersed in the vivid moment, he was everything by starts and nothing long. Yet at forty-four he could hark back to nine with an ease that implied the closest continuity. "As I go on in life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing: the commonest things are a burden." That is one side. "A Child's Garden of Verses" (which once, it is still dismaying to hear, was in actual danger of be

ing entitled "The Innocent Muse") is the other. At twenty-one, on the other hand, he confesses to an overwhelming sense of age with as obvious and conscious an illusion as a boy masquerading in a false beard. Such a man never grows old, if indeed he ever really grows up. A passion to makebelieve affords the spirit-and through the spirit the body-a long series of fresh starts. Stevenson invariably dressed for his part, and certainly had the run of a most enviable wardrobe. But whether it was Hamlet or Mercutio or Malvolio that was the evening's programme, his full plain name is writ large upon the bill. He sends home a series of fresh and glancing letters to a class of children, all about the flora and fauna and the people he loved (a medley of both) of Samoa, and one sees the rows of rapt faces turned up in his fancy, as he writes, to that long lean one shrewdly smiling over an imaginary desk. However diverse his disguises, one individuality informed them all.

candid

In pov

He followed truth with a high heart, and at times with a high hand. When he played the "diabolically" friend, it is hard to say which of the two he was more-candid or friendly. Very rarely is he ill at ease in his enthusiastic frankness, though to his "dear lad," Henley, we seem to detect now and then an air of protesting too much. His courage was as conscious as his candor, yet neither was the less genuine and daring for that. erty he wore its livery with an air. "God knows I am glad enough of five pounds!"-he could as easily have said that in times of dearth as he said it in times of plenty. And when comparative affluence came and flattering fame, he listened to their jingle and warmed both hands at the blaze with a frank satisfaction, and without the least defect of good sense. If, indeed, in a moment of overplus he could honestly

exclaim, "Fame is nothing to a yachtthe thing at large is a bore and a fraud," it is possible, we may suppose, to weary even of an oasis in the Sahara. And the most vital privilege of possessing anything is the pleasure of good-humoredly decrying it. In all his ups and downs of success and failure, of exuberance and sterility Stevenson trailed a sanguine banner behind him, not the less a gallant thing for the admiring or depreciatory glances occasionally cast over his shoulder at it by its bearer. And never was that banner so stubbornly brandished aloft as in his early misunderstandings with his father, never so willingly furled as when in age and sickness that father resigned the office of counsellor to a son who had triumphed without boasting.

Apart from personality, there is matter of every kind of interest in these new letters-letters descriptive, analytical, narrative, philosophical; chance criticisms of his own and of other men's art and work; such a bombshell as a spirited defence by a prosperous human being of a drastic income-tax; and countless impulsive scraps of autobiography like the passage which describes himself and Maggie and his two cousins lying on their backs so close together on a shawl, their faces skywards, with midges in the air below indistinguishable from circling birds in the blue above, and limbs so complexedly intervolved that when a hand was held aloft argument was necessary to determine to which of the four gay bodies it belonged. In many of these letters, as elsewhere in Stevenson's work, the literary craftsman, whose unfailing despair and felicity through life was to make his sentences "whole and comely," the juggler with words who could yet liken these plastic and almost sentient things to brickbats, is Stevenrather too much in evidence. son was always itching for his tools.

Many a fragment of epistolary ele gance and exactitude, such as "Only the most infinitesimal and indeterminate of oscillations moved us hither and thither" reveals the fledgling. Even his slang has a look of the forced hybrid now and again, and his sincerity is tinged at times with an ingenuity like that of fine penmanship. He won through all that. And at his best he is among the few letter-writers of yesterday who should surely survive the extinction of the interests of his time.

His restlessness, his rather highpitched key, and even, as we are sometimes tempted to think, his incomplete surrender of his inmost self, may, as time goes by, whittle away in some measure the fascination which he exercised so effortlessly and without any sacrifice of good faith over his contemporaries. He never quite won to the quietude of mind, the tolerant restfulness that in letters, as in books and men, make so deep and abiding an appeal. He generally told a little more than the truth to ensure the balance tilting to the right side. He was often (most winning of maladies) morbidly happy. All his life was a bitter fight against not only death but dying; and through all his most intimate letters sound challenge, defiance, and bravado. He earned the privilege to preach. "I fear I was born a parson." And his text is ever a reveille that defies the darkness so close about him, and ignores for the most part the twilight in which it is the fate of so many men to spend their spiritual lives. "I am trying to be faithful to my creed and hope, . . . to give a good example before men, and show them how goodness and fortitude and faith re

The Times.

main undiminished after they have been stripped bare of all that is formal and outside." These are brave words from a boy of twenty-three, but they are curiously prophetic of what was to come. "We are not meant to be good in this world, but to try to be, and fail, and keep on trying; and when we get a cake, to say, "Thank God!' and when we get a buffet, to say, 'Just so: well hit!" " Few men have had to cry "Well hit!" so reiteratedly as Stevenson. And there is no dulness or smugness in an optimism that is simply a watchdog set to keep the wolf from a door ever ajar. It is, none the less, possible, after reading many such passages, to get the bearings of Henley's tart "Fastidious Brisk," especially when it is set off against Mrs. Stevenson's impulsive "canarybird." Even under the darkest cloud Stevenson could still pretend to be the nimble, idiosyncratic, spontaneous companion he was to himself in brighter hours; still shrilled on behind such slender bars. His spirit flatly refused to weary with his body of walking life's magic island-that might at any moment prove so easily but a transitory illusion of Prospero's wand. First and last he was the solitary, furcapped Crusoe of his dreams. And so it comes about that he seems too often to be the child at fantastic play, too seldom the child lost to self in self, contemplative. Nor need saying this imply the least disloyalty to a figure so frank, generous, and true. "The vanished Tusitala" are the last words of the last letter in these volumes. Few have been the tellers of tales whose lives as revealed in a searching lifelong correspondence have proved their most spirited and romantic achievement.