In August, 1887, Stevenson left England for ever, arriving at New York
as a lion, hunted by reporters, whom, no doubt, he received with the
majestic courtesy of his own Prince of Bohemia. Two versions of Jekyll
and Hyde were being acted; all this was very unlike the calm
indifference of his native land. It seems that in Jekyll, as "Terryfled"
(in Scott's phrase), there is a "love interest"; love is alien to Dr.
Jekyll, as to the shepherd before he found that Love was a dweller on
the rocks. The Terryfication was, at least, an advertisement. To
advertise himself, in the modern way, Stevenson was not competent. He
never was interviewed as a Celebrity at Home, as far as I am aware.
Indeed, he loved not society papers, and lit a bonfire and danced a
dance around it in his garden, when some editor of a journal of that
sort was committed to prison. His name is not mentioned, but Stevenson
and I had against him a grudge of very old standing.

Dollars in sufficient profusion were offered for his works, and in the
Adirondack Hills, beside a frozen river in the starlit night, he dreamed
of "a story of many years and countries, of the sea and the land,
savagery and civilization." He thought of that old Indian marvel, the
suspended life of the buried fakir, over whose grave the corn is sown
and grown. He thought of an evil genius on whom this method should be
tried in frozen Canadian earth. Thus, what seems like the far-fetched
idea of a wearied fancy in "The Master of Ballantrae" was, from the
first, of the essence of that bitter romance. The new conception fitted
in with a tale, already dreamed of on the Perthshire moors, about the
dark adventurous years of the Jacobite eclipse. The Prince was hidden in
a convent of Paris, or flashing for a moment in the Mall, or cruising, a
dingy bearded wanderer, in Germany or the Netherlands; while his
followers were serving under French colours, under Montcalm or
Lally-Tolendal. Men who had charged side by side at Gledsmuir and
Culloden, might meet as foes in Canada or Hindostan. There is matter
enough, in 1750-1765, for scores of romances, but who now can write
them? But the Master did not now begin his deeds of bale. Stevenson's
stepson, Mr. Osbourne, then very young, himself wrote "The Finsbury
Tontine; or The Game of Bluff," and I was informed at the time by
Stevenson's devoted admirer, Mr. McClure, that the book was completed by
Mr. Osbourne for the Press. Then Stevenson took up the manuscript, and,
as Mr. Osbourne says, "forced the thing to live as it had never lived
before." Indeed, the style of "The Wrong Box" throughout, is Louis's
style in such romantic farces as "The New Arabian Nights," a manner of
his own creation.

I seem to remember that I saw the finished manuscript, or perhaps an
early copy of the book, and I did not care for it. Mr. Kipling rather
surprised me by finding it so very amusing. Mr. Osbourne says that the
story "still retains (it seems to me) a sense of failure," and that the
public does not relish it. For my own part, on later re-readings, the
little farce has made me laugh hysterically at the sorrows of Mr.
William Pitman, that mild drawing-master, caught up and whirled away
into adventures worthy of the great Fortuné du Boisgobey. The scene in
which he is described as the American Broadwood, a person inured to a
simple patriarchal life, a being of violent passions; with the immortal
John in the character of the Great Vance; and that joy for ever, Uncle
Joseph, with his deathless thirst for popular information and
instruction--these personages, this "educated insolence," never cease to
amuse. Uncle Joseph is no caricature. But the world likes its
sensational novels to be written with becoming seriousness; in short,
"The Wrong Box" is aimed at a small but devoted circle of admirers.

People constantly ask men who have collaborated how they do the
business? As a rule, so some French collaborator says, "some one is the
dupe, and he is the man of genius." This was not true, too notably, in
the case of Alexandre Dumas, nor was it true in Stevenson's case. As a
rule, one man does the work, and the other looks on, but, again, this
was not the way in which Stevenson and Mr. Osbourne worked. They first
talked over the book together, and ideas were struck out in the
encounter of minds. This practice may, very probably, prove unfruitful,
or even injurious, to many writers; they are confused rather than
assisted. After or during the course of the conversations (when he had
an ally), after reflection, when he had not, Stevenson used to write out
a series of chapter headings. One, I remember, was "The Master of
Ballantrae to the Rescue," an incident in a tale which he began about
the obscure adventures of Prince Charles in 1749-1750. "Ballantrae to
the Rescue"--the sound was promising, but I do not know who was to be
obliged by the Master.

After the list of chapters was completed, Mr. Osbourne used to write the
first draft, "to break the ground," and then each wrote and rewrote, an
indefinite number of times. The style, the general effect produced, are
the style and the effect of Stevenson. "He liked the comradeship." More
care was taken than on a novel of which I and another were greatly
guilty. My partner represented Mr. Nicholas Wogan as rubbing his hands
after a bullet at Fontenoy (as history and I made quite clear) had
deprived Mr. Wogan of one of his arms. There is no such error in the
"Iliad," despite the unnumbered multitude of collaborators detected by
the Higher Criticism.

In June, 1888, Stevenson sailed out on the Pacific in search of health,
and followed the shining shadow through the isles and seas till he made
his last home at Samoa. It was a three years' cruise among "summer isles
of Eden." Perhaps no book of Stevenson's is less popular than his
narrative of storm and calm, of beachcombers and brown Polynesian
princes. The scenery is too exotic for the general taste. The joy and
sorrow of Stevenson was to find a society "in much the same
convulsionary and transitional state" as the Highlands and Islands after
1745. He was always haunted, and in popularity retarded, by History. He
wanted to know about details of savage custom and of superstitious
belief, a taste very far from being universal even in the most highly
cultivated circles, where Folklore is a name of fear. He found among the
natives such fatal Polynesian fairy ladies as they of Glenfinlas, on
whom Scott wrote the ballad. He found a medicine-man who hypnotized him
from behind his back, which nobody at home had been able to do before
his face. He exchanged stories with the clansmen--Scots for Polynesian;
they were much the same in character and incident. He had found, in
Polynesia, the way out of our own present. He met a Polynesian Queen--a
Mary Stuart or a Helen of Troy grown old. "She had been passed from
chief to chief; she had been fought for and taken in war"; a "Queen of
Cannibals, tattooed from head to foot." Now she had reached the Elysian
plain and a windless age, living in religion, as it were: "she passes
all her days with the sisters."

She was not a white woman: none of these people, so courteous and kind,
were white, were up-to-date. In London and New York amateurs did not
want to be told about them in Stevenson's "Letters from the South
Seas." Stevenson "collected songs and legends": fortunately he also
worked at "The Master of Ballantrae," in spite of frequent illnesses,
and many perils of the sea. "The Master of Ballantrae" was finished at
Honolulu; the closing chapters are the work of a weary pen.

He had made tryst with an evil genius that was essential to the
conception of the book, and with a hideous tale of fraternal hatred,
told by a constitutional coward. Everything is under the shadow of
thunder and lit by lightning. A glimpse of Allan Breck, and the
babblings of the Chevalier Bourke, are the only relief. But the life is
as clearly seen as life in Stevenson's books always is, for example when
the guinea is thrown through the stained window pane, or the old
serving-man holds the candle to light the duel of brothers who are born
foes; or as in the final scenes of desperate wanderings in the company
of murderers through Canadian snows. But the book, as Sir Henry Yule
said, is "as grim as the road to Lucknow"--as it was intended to be.

A fresh cruise, in the following year, bettered his health, and brought
him the anecdote of a mystery of the sea which was the germ of "The
Wrecker." He saw Samoa, and bought land there--Vailima--the last and
best of his resting-places; and here he was joined, in 1891, by his
intrepid mother. He was now a lord of land, a householder in his
unpretentious Abbotsford, and "a great chief" among the natives,
distracted as they were by a king _de facto_, and a king over the water,
with the sonorous names of Malietoa and Mataafa. Samoan politics, the
strifes of Germany, England, and the States, were labyrinthine: their
chronicle is written in his "Footnote to History." My conjectures as to
the romantic side of his dealings with the rightful king are vague and
need not be recorded. "You can be in a new conspiracy every day," said
an Irishman with zest, but conspiracies are better things in fiction
than in real life; and Stevenson had no personal ambitions, and, withal,
as much common sense as Shelley displayed in certain late events of his
life. He turned to the half-finished "Wrecker" and completed it.

When the story began to appear in "Scribner's Magazine" it seemed full
of vivacity and promise. The opening scenes in the Pacific were like
Paradise, as the author said, to dwellers in Brixton, or other purlieus
of London. The financial school at which Loudon Dodd was educated in
Stock Exchange flutters was rather less convincing than any dream of
Paradise, but none the less amusing. At home in Edinburgh, with the old
Scottish master of jerry-building and of "plinths," the atmosphere was
truly Scots, tea-coseys and all, while the reminiscences of Paris and
Fontainebleau, and the _grandeurs et misères_ of "the young
Americo-Parisienne sculptor" were perfectly fresh to the world, though
some of the anecdotes were known to Stevenson's intimates. Mr. James
Pinkerton is a laudable creation, with his loyalty, his innocence, his
total ignorance and complete lack of taste, and his scampers too near
the wind of commercial probity. The spirit of hustle incarnate in a man
otherwise so innocent, the ideals caught from heaven knows what American
works for the young, and the inspired patriotism, the blundering
enthusiastic affection, make the early Pinkerton a study as original as
it is entertaining.

The sale by auction of the wreck, which, by arrangement, is to be
Pinkerton's prey, the mysterious opposition of the other bidder, so
determined to win an object apparently so worthless, is no less
thrilling than the sale of the fur coat in Boisgobey's "Crime de
l'Opéra." But the reader knows why the fur coat is so much desired,
whereas I remember being driven so wild by curiosity about the value of
the wreck that I wrote to Louis, desiring to learn the secret. He would
not divulge it, and when, after the voyage to the island and the
excitement of knocking the wreck to pieces were over--when the secret
came out, it was neither pleasant nor probable. That a mild British
amateur of water-colour drawing should have taken part in a massacre of
men, shot painfully with cheap revolvers, was an example of "the
possible improbable," and much more of a tax on belief than the
transformation of Dr. Jekyll. When I mildly urged this criticism, I
learned, by return of post, from a correspondent usually as dilatory as
Wordsworth, that I was a stay-at-home person ignorant of the world, and
of life as it is lived by full-blooded men on the high seas. That was
very true, but the amateur in water-colour was also a mild kind of good
being. "What would I have done with the crew who were such compromising
witnesses, and were butchered?" I would have marooned them.

"The Beach of Falesá" is a revelation of unfamiliar life and character,
and one is attached to the little brown heroine. There was to have been
"a supernatural element," better, probably, than the device of the
Æolian harps hung in the thicket. "I have got the smell and the look of
the thing a good deal," he said, and he had got the style of his rough
English narrator, who was, as he told the missionary, "what you call a
sinner, what I call a sweep," but repented in time.

A period of many projects followed; one, "The Young Chevalier," had a
germ in "The Letter of Henry Goring" (1749-1750), with which I brought
him acquainted, not knowing then that it was merely a romance by the
prolific Eliza Heywood. It was in this tale that the Master of
Ballantrae was to come to the rescue, and I think that a Scottish
assassin (who lurks obscure in real history) and Mandrin, the famed
French robber, were to appear, but only a chapter is published among
other fragments. As it stands, Prince Charles's eyes are alternately
blue and brown; brown was their actual colour--they were like
Stevenson's own.

Fortunately, the "Chevalier" was deserted for the continuation of
"Kidnapped," a sequel which is as good as, or, thanks to the two
heroines, Catriona and Barbara Grant, is even better than, the original.
To think of it is to wish to take it from the shelf and read it again.
It is all excellent, from the scenes where Alan is hiding under a
haystack (suggested by an adventure of the Chevalier Johnstone after
Culloden), and the first meeting with that good daughter of Clan Alpine
and of James Mor, onwards.

Stevenson excited a good deal of odium among fiery Celts by his
scoundrel Master of Lovat. There is no reason, as far as I am aware, to
suppose that Simon was a scoundrel, but, as a figure in fiction, he is
very firmly drawn. The abortive duel of Balfour with the Highland
Ensign, who conceives high esteem of "Palfour," is in the author's best
manner, as are the days of prison in that "unco place, the Bass," and he
was justly proud of the wizard tale of Tod Lapraik. The bristling
demeanour of Alan Breck and James Mor (a very gallant but distinctly
unfortunate son of Rob Roy), seems a correct picture. Indeed, James Mor
was correctly divined, probably from letters of his published in Scott's
"Rob Roy." It does not appear that Stevenson ever saw a number of
James's letters in the character of a spy (a spy who appears to be
carefully bamboozling his employers), which exist in the Newcastle MSS.
in the British Museum. But the James of these letters is the James of
"Catriona." The scenes with the advocates of James of the Glens, at
Inveraray, read as if they had been recorded in shorthand, at the
moment. David himself is, of course, the Lowland prig he is meant to be,
but Catriona, at last, was a moving heroine, though Stevenson, justly,
preferred to her the beautiful Miss Grant, and entirely overcame the
difficulty of making us realise her beauty. The Princess, in "Prince
Otto," is a fair shadow, compared to Miss Grant, and Stevenson at last
convinced most readers that if he had omitted the interest of womanhood,
it was not from incompetence--though it may have been from diffidence.

At this time we used to receive letters from him not infrequently; he
sent me the "Luck of Apemama," which he sacrilegiously purchased from
its holder. This fetish, the palladium of the island, was in one point
remarkable--a very ordinary shell in a perfectly new box of native make.
Why it was thought "great medicine" and ignorantly worshipped, the
pale-face student of magic and religion could not understand. However,
it was the Luck of the island, and when it crossed the sea to Europe a
pestilence of measles fell on the native population. There was no
manifest connection of cause and effect.

Stevenson's letters to me were merely such notes as he might have
written had we both been living within the four-mile radius; usually
notes about books which he needed, always brightened with a quip and
some original application of slang. Occasionally there were rhymes. One
was about a lady:

    "Who beckled, beckled, beckled gaily."

Another had the refrain:

    "The dibs that take the islands
    Are the dollars of Peru."

One long and lively piece was on the Achaean hero of a fantastic romance
by Mr. Rider Haggard and myself: the Ithacan, the Stormer of the City.
Stevenson exclaimed:

    "Ye wily auld blackguard,
    How far ye hae staggered,
    Frae Homer to Haggard
    And Lang."

How variously excellent he was as a letter-writer the readers of his
correspondence know, and how vast, considering his labours and his
health, that correspondence is! Often it is freakish, often it is
serious, but except in some epistles of the period of his
apprenticeship, it is never written as if he anticipated the publisher
and the editor. Good examples are his letters to a reviewer, who,
criticizing him without knowing him, wrote as if he were either an
insensible athletic optimist, or a sufferer who was a _poseur_. "The
fact is, consciously or not, you doubt my honesty.... _Any brave man may
make out_ a life which shall be happy for himself, and, by so being,
beneficent to those about him. And if he fail, why should I hear him
weeping?" Why, indeed? Think of Mr. Carlyle! "Did I groan loud, or did I
groan low, Wackford?" said Mr. Squeers. Mr. Carlyle groaned loud,
sometimes with fair reason. Stevenson did not groan at all. If he
posed, if his silence was a pose, it was heroic. But his intellectual
high spirits were almost invincible. If he had a pen in his hand, the
_follet_ of Molière rode it. Mr. Thomas Emmett, that famous Yorkshire
cricketer, has spoken words of gold: "I was always happy as long as I
was bowling." Stevenson, I think, was almost always happy when he was
writing, when the instrument of his art was in his fingers.

Consider the deliberate and self-conscious glumness; the willful making
the worst of things (in themselves pretty bad, I admit), that mark the
novels of eminent moderns who thrive on their inexpensive pessimism, and
have a name as _Psychologues! Ohé, les Psychologues_! Does anyone
suppose that Stevenson could not have dipped his pencil in squalor and
gloom, and psychology, and "oppositions of science falsely so-called,"
as St. Paul, in the spirit of prophecy, remarks? "Ugliness is only the
prose of horror," he said. "It is when you are not able to write
'Macbeth' that you write 'Thérèse Raquin' ... In any case, and under any
fashion, the great man produces beauty, terror, and mirth, and the
little man produces----" We know what he produces, and though his books
may be praised as if the little man were a Sophocles up to date, he and
his works are a weariness to think upon. In them is neither beauty,
mirth, nor terror, except the terror of illimitable ennui.

None the less, I believe that the little men of woe are happy; are
enjoying themselves, while they are writing, while they are doing their
best to make the public comfortably miserable. If these authors were as
candid as Stevenson they would admit that they enjoy their "merry days
of desolation," and that the world is not such a bad place for them,
after all. But perhaps before this truth can be accepted and confessed
by these eminent practitioners in pessimism, a gleam of humour must
arise on their darkness--and that is past praying for. There is a burden
of a Scots song which, perhaps, may have sung itself in the ear of
Louis, when life was at its darkest:

    _"And werena my heart licht I wad die!"_

Having finished "Catriona," at about the age that Scott had when he
wrote his first novel, "Waverley," Stevenson thought of "Weir of
Hermiston," ("I thought of Mr. Pickwick," says Dickens with admirable
simplicity), and fell to that work furiously, as was his wont when a
great theme dawned on him. But soon, as usual, came the cold fit; his
inspirations being intermittent for some untraced reason, physical or
psychological. Possibly he foresaw the practical difficulty of his
initial idea: that the Roman Father should sit on the bench of Scottish
Themis and try his own son on a capital charge. This would not have been
permitted to occur in Scotland, even when "the Fifteen" were first
constituted into a Court. If humane emotions did not forbid, it must
have been clear that no Scottish judge (they were not "kinless loons")
would have permitted his son to be found guilty. Conceivably this
damping circumstance occurred to Stevenson. He dropped, for a while, the
hanging judge, and began "St. Ives" as a short story. It was now that,
early in 1893, under an attack of hemorrhage, Stevenson dictated his
tale to his stepdaughter, on his fingers, in the gesture alphabet of the
dumb. Perhaps this feat is as marvelous as Scott's dictating "The Bride
of Lammermoor," _in tormentis_, to Will Laidlaw.

We see how his maladies hung on Stevenson's flank, even in Samoa, where
his health had so remarkably improved, and permitted to him unwonted
activities. After a visit to Sydney, he took up "The Ebb-Tide" in
collaboration with Mr. Osbourne, whose draft of the first chapters he
warmly applauded. It is not one of his central successes. His pencil was
dipped in moral gloom, but even to the odious Cockney scoundrel, Huish,
his Shakespearian tolerance accorded the virtue of indomitable courage.
He could not help filling the book full with his abundant vitality and
his keen observation of the islands and the beachcombers. The thing, to
use an obsolete piece of slang, is _vécu_. There were other projects,
many of them, which dawned rosily, and faded into the grey; and there
was the rich and copious correspondence dated from Vailima. His friends,
no doubt, hearing of his good health, now and then, hoped to see his
face again; the grouse on the hills of home were calling their eternal
_Come back! come back!_

Stevenson, who himself could live contentedly on so little, was the most
open-handed of men, the most liberal and cheerful of givers; and whether
to Samoans in distressful times, or to others who sought his aid, his
purse was never closed; while his hospitality was like Sir Walter's.
Probably, in his hour of greatest success, he never was among "the best
sellers." But any financial anxieties which may have beset him were
assuaged, and his heart was greatly held up, by the success of the
beautiful "Edinburgh Edition" of his works, conceived and carried out by
the energy of his friend of old Edinburgh days, Mr. Charles Baxter.

His latest work was "Weir of Hermiston"; the plenitude of his genius
shines in every page. He himself thought that this was his best work;
so far as we can judge by the considerable fragment that exists, he
was in the right. There is nothing immature, nothing here of the boy;
he is approaching, in his tale, a fateful point of passion and
disaster; his characters, especially the elder woman, the nurse, are
entirely human, with no touch of caprice; they all live their separate
lives in our memories. Then the end came. One moment of bewildered
consciousness--then unconsciousness and death. He had written to me,
some months before, a letter full of apprehensions of the fate of
Scott and Swift; whether warned by some monitory experience, or
whether he had merely chanced to be thinking of the two great men who
outlived themselves. To him death had come almost as a friend in the
fullness of his powers; there was no touch of weakness or decay, and
he was mourned like a king by his Samoans, by his family, by all who
had known him, and by many thousands who had never seen his face.
There was mourning at home in Scotland (where we hoped against hope
that the news was untrue), in England, in Europe, in America, in
Australia and the Isles. He who had been such "a friendly writer," who
had created for us so many friends in his characters, had made more
friends for himself, friends more and more various in age, race,
tastes, character, and temper, than any British writer, perhaps, since
Dickens. He was taken from us untimely; broken was our strong hope in
the future gifts of his genius, and there was a pain that does not
attend the peaceful passing, in the fullness of years and wisdom and
honour, of an immortal like Tennyson.

Any attempt by a contemporary to "place" Stevenson, to give him his
"class" in English literature, would be a folly. The future must judge
for itself, and, if we may estimate the taste of the future by that of
the present, the reading public will not often look behind the most
recent publications of its own day. But _les délicats_ will look back on
Stevenson as they now look back on Fielding, who, to my simple thinking,
remains unsurpassed as a novelist; and as they turn to Lamb and Hazlitt
as essayists. The poet is, of course, at his best immortal--time cannot
stale _Beowulf_, or the nameless lyrists of the fourteenth century, or
Chaucer, or Spenser, and so with the rest, _la mort n'y mord_. But it is
as a writer of prose that Stevenson must be remembered. If he is not the
master British essayist of the later nineteenth century, I really cannot
imagine who is to be preferred to him. His vivacity, vitality, his
original reflections on life, his personal and fascinating style, claim
for him the crown. Nobody, perhaps, places him beside Lamb, and he would
not have dreamed of being equaled in renown with Hazlitt, while he is,
I conceive, more generally sympathetic than Mr. Pater, whose place is
apart, whose province is entirely his own. When we think of Stevenson as
a novelist, there is this conspicuous drawback, that he never did write
a novel on characters and conditions in the mid-stream of the life that
was contemporary with himself. He does not compete, therefore, with
Thackeray and Dickens, Mr. Hardy and Mr. Meredith, but Scott is also no
competitor.

"St. Ronan's Well" is Scott's only novel that deals with precisely
contemporary life, and "St. Ronan's Well" is a kind of backwater; the
story of a remote contemporary watering-place, of local squireens, and
of a tragedy, mangled in deference to James Ballantyne. Scott did not
often care to trust himself out of the last echoes of "the pipes that
played for Charlie," and though his knowledge of contemporary life was
infinitely wider than Stevenson's, we see many good reasons for his
abstention from use of his knowledge. For example, it is obvious that he
could not attempt a romance of the War in the Peninsula, and of life in
London, let us say, while Wellington was holding Torres Vedras. Even
among Stevenson's abandoned projects, there is not, I think, one which
deals with English society in the 'eighties. His health and his fugitive
life imposed on him those limitations against which his taste did not
rebel, for his taste led him to the past, and to adventure in a present
not English, but exotic. He is not in the same field, so to speak, as
Richardson and Fielding, Dickens and Thackeray, Mr. Hardy and Mr.
Meredith; and their field, the great living world of their time, is what
the general reader wants the novelist to deal with as he best may.

Shakespeare, to be sure, wrote no drama on Elizabethan times in England;
we must go to Heywood and Ben Jonson for the drama of his contemporary
world. Many circumstances caused Stevenson, when at his best, to be a
historical novelist, and he is, since Scott and Thackeray, the best
historical novelist whom we have.

Add to all this his notable eminence in tales of shorter scope; in
essays, whether on life or on literature, so various and original, so
graceful and so strong; add the fantasies of his fables, and remember
that almost all he did is good--and we must, I think, give to Stevenson
a very high place in the literature of his century.

Of his verse I have hitherto said nothing, and I do not think that if he
had written verse alone, his place would have been highly distinguished.
His "Child's Garden of Verse" is a little masterpiece in a _genre_ of
his own invention. His verses in Scots are full of humour, and he had a
complete mastery of the old Northern English of the Lowlands. His more
serious poems often contain ideas and the expression of moods which he
handled better, I think, in his prose. Even the story of "Ticonderoga" I
would rather have received from him in prose than in his ballad measure.
Possibly I am prejudiced a little by his willfulness in giving to a
Cameron the part of the generous hero; true to his word, in spite of the
desire to avenge a brother, and of the thrice-repeated monition of the
dead. It is not that I grudge any glory to the children of Lochiel, a
clan, in General Wolfe's opinion, the bravest where all were brave, a
clan of constant and boundless loyalty. But in Stevenson's own note to
his poem, the Cameron "swears by his sword and Ben Cruachan," and
"Cruachan" is a slogan of the Campbells. The hero, as a matter of fact,
was a Campbell of Inverawe. "Between the name of _Cameron_ and that of
_Campbell_ the Muse will never hesitate," says Stevenson. One name means
"Wry mouth," the other "Crooked nose"; so far, the Muse has a poor
choice! But the tale is a tale of the Campbells, of Clan Diarmaid, and
the Muse must adhere to the historic truth.

This essay must not close on a difference of opinion concerning
historical events--a jarring note.

There are points enough in Stevenson's character and opinions which I
have not touched; such as his religious views. He never mentioned the
topic of religion in my hearing; it is to his printed words that the
reader must turn, and he cannot but perceive that Stevenson's was a
deeply religious nature. With his faith, whatever its tenets may have
been, was implicated his uneasily active conscience; his sense of duty.
This appears to have directed his life; and was practically the same
thing as his sense of honour. Honour, I conceive, is, in a phrase of
Aristotle's, duty "with a bloom on it."

Readers of his Letters, and of his Biography by his cousin, Mr. Balfour;
readers of his essays, and of his novels, must see that he was keenly
interested in cases of conscience; in the right course to steer in an
apparent conflict of duties. To say that his theory of the right course,
in a hypothetical instance, was always the same as my own would be to
abuse the confidence of the reader. As Preston-grange observes: "I would
never charge myself with Mr. David's conscience; and if you could cast
some part of it (as you went by) in a moss bog, you would find yourself
to ride much easier without it"; and _not_, perhaps, always in the wrong
direction. There is a case of conscience in "The Wrecker," something
about opium-smuggling, and the conscience of Mr. Loudon Dodd (a truly
Balfourian character), which I have studied, aided by other casuists,
for a summer's day. We never could agree as to what the case really was,
as to what was the moral issue.

Casuistry may not be my strong point. I have found myself between no
less authorities than a Chancellor of England and a learned Jesuit, both
of whom, I thought, would certainly accept my view of a very unusual
case of conduct. A certain cleric, in his ecclesiastical duties,
happened to overhear an automatically uttered remark by another person;
who never meant to speak or to be overheard. The cleric acted on this
information, with results distressing to a pair of true lovers. I
maintained that he did wrong. "There was no appeal," I said, "to the
umpire. Nobody in the field asked 'How's that?'" But the Chancellor and
the learned Jesuit backed the clergyman.

Now, I never knew for certain how "Mr. David's conscience" would decide,
but I think he would have been with me on this occasion, and with the
Rules of the Game.

There was a very pleasant trait in Stevenson's character which, perhaps,
does not display itself in most of his writings; his great affection for
children. In "A Child's Garden of Verse," delightful as it is, and not
to be read without "a great inclination to cry," the child is himself,
the child "that is gone." But, in an early letter, he writes: "Kids is
what is the matter with me ... Children are too good to be true." He had
a natural infatuation, so to say, for children as children, which many
men of the pen overcome with no apparent difficulty. He could not
overcome it; little boys and girls were his delight, and he was theirs.
At Molokai, the Leper Island, he played croquet with the little girls;
refusing to wear gloves, lest he should remind them of their condition.
Sensitive and weak in body as he was, Nelson was not more fearless. It
was equally characteristic of another quality of his, the open hand,
that he gave a grand piano to these leper children.

He says:

    "But the nearest friends are the auldest friends,
    And the grave's the place to seek them."

Among the nearest and the oldest friends of his I never was, but to few
friends, nearer and older, does my _desiderium_ go back so frequently;
simply because almost every day brings something newly learned or known,
which would have appealed most to his unequaled breadth of knowledge
and interest and sympathy.

ANDREW LANG.




AN INLAND VOYAGE


    "Thus sang they in the English boat."

    MARVELL.



_TO_

_SIR WALTER GRINDLAY SIMPSON, BART._


_My dear "Cigarette,"_

_It was enough that you should have shared so liberally in the rains and
portages of our voyage; that you should have had so hard a paddle to
recover the derelict "Arethusa" on the flooded Oise: and that you should
thenceforth have piloted a mere wreck of mankind to Origny
Sainte-Benoîte and a supper so eagerly desired. It was perhaps more than
enough, as you once somewhat piteously complained, that I should have
set down all the strong language to you, and kept the appropriate
reflections for myself. I could not in decency expose you to share the
disgrace of another and more public shipwreck. But now that this voyage
of ours is going into a cheap edition, that peril, we shall hope, is at
an end, and I may put your name on the burgee._

_But I cannot pause till I have lamented the fate of our two ships. That,
sir, was not a fortunate day when we projected the possession of a canal
barge; it was not a fortunate day when we shared our daydream with the
most hopeful of daydreamers. For a while, indeed, the world looked
smilingly. The barge was procured and christened, and as the "Eleven
Thousand Virgins of Cologne," lay for some months, the admired of all
admirers, in a pleasant river and under the walls of an ancient town. M.
Mattras, the accomplished carpenter of Moret, had made her a centre of
emulous labour; and you will not have forgotten the amount of sweet
champagne consumed in the inn at the bridge end, to give zeal to the
workmen and speed to the work. On the financial aspect I would_ _not
willingly dwell. The "Eleven Thousand Virgins of Cologne" rotted in the
stream where she was beautified. She felt not the impulse of the breeze;
she was never harnessed to the patent track-horse. And when at length
she was sold, by the indignant carpenter of Moret, there were sold along
with her the "Arethusa" and the "Cigarette", she of cedar, she, as we
knew so keenly on a portage, of solid-hearted English oak. Now these
historic vessels fly the tricolour and are known by new and alien
names._

_R. L. S._




PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION


To equip so small a book with a preface is, I am half afraid, to sin
against proportion. But a preface is more than an author can resist, for
it is the reward of his labours. When the foundation-stone is laid, the
architect appears with his plans, and struts for an hour before the
public eye. So with the writer in his preface: he may have never a word
to say, but he must show himself for a moment in the portico, hat in
hand, and with an urbane demeanour.

It is best, in such circumstances, to represent a delicate shade of
manner between humility and superiority: as if the book had been written
by someone else, and you had merely run over it and inserted what was
good. But for my part I have not yet learned the trick to that
perfection; I am not yet able to dissemble the warmth of my sentiments
towards a reader; and if I meet him on the threshold, it is to invite
him in with country cordiality.

To say truth, I had no sooner finished reading this little book in
proof, than I was seized upon by a distressing apprehension. It occurred
to me that I might not only be the first to read these pages, but the
last as well; that I might have pioneered this very smiling tract of
country all in vain, and find not a soul to follow in my steps. The more
I thought, the more I disliked the notion; until the distaste grew into
a sort of panic terror, and I rushed into this Preface, which is no more
than an advertisement for readers.

What am I to say for my book? Caleb and Joshua brought back from
Palestine a formidable bunch of grapes; alas! my book produces naught so
nourishing; and for the matter of that, we live in an age when people
prefer a definition to any quantity of fruit.

I wonder, would a negative be found enticing? for, from the negative
point of view, I flatter myself this volume has a certain stamp.
Although it runs to considerably upwards of two hundred pages, it
contains not a single reference to the imbecility of God's universe, nor
so much as a single hint that I could have made a better one myself.--I
really do not know where my head can have been. I seem to have forgotten
all that makes it glorious to be man.--'Tis an omission that renders the
book philosophically unimportant; but I am in hopes the eccentricity may
please in frivolous circles.

To the friend who accompanied me I owe many thanks already, indeed I
wish I owed him nothing else; but at this moment I feel towards him an
almost exaggerated tenderness. He, at least, will become my reader:--if
it were only to follow his own travels alongside of mine.

R. L. S.




AN INLAND VOYAGE

ANTWERP TO BOOM


We made a great stir in Antwerp Docks. A stevedore and a lot of dock
porters took up the two canoes, and ran with them for the slip. A crowd
of children followed cheering. The _Cigarette_ went off in a splash and
a bubble of small breaking water. Next moment the _Arethusa_ was after
her. A steamer was coming down, men on the paddle-box shouted hoarse
warnings, the stevedore and his porters were bawling from the quay. But
in a stroke or two the canoes were away out in the middle of the
Scheldt, and all steamers, and stevedores, and other long-shore vanities
were left behind.

The sun shone brightly; the tide was making--four jolly miles an hour;
the wind blew steadily, with occasional squalls. For my part, I had
never been in a canoe under sail in my life; and my first experiment out
in the middle of this big river was not made without some trepidation.
What would happen when the wind first caught my little canvas? I suppose
it was almost as trying a venture into the regions of the unknown as to
publish a first book, or to marry. But my doubts were not of long
duration; and in five minutes you will not be surprised to learn that I
had tied my sheet.

I own I was a little struck by this circumstance myself; of course, in
company with the rest of my fellow-men, I had always tied the sheet in a
sailing-boat; but in so little and crank a concern as a canoe, and with
these charging squalls, I was not prepared to find myself follow the
same principle; and it inspired me with some contemptuous views of our
regard for life. It is certainly easier to smoke with the sheet
fastened; but I had never before weighed a comfortable pipe of tobacco
against an obvious risk, and gravely elected for the comfortable pipe.
It is a commonplace, that we cannot answer for ourselves before we have
been tried. But it is not so common a reflection, and surely more
consoling, that we usually find ourselves a great deal braver and better
than we thought. I believe this is every one's experience: but an
apprehension that they may belie themselves in the future prevents
mankind from trumpeting this cheerful sentiment abroad. I wish
sincerely, for it would have saved me much trouble, there had been some
one to put me in a good heart about life when I was younger; to tell me
how dangers are most portentous on a distant sight; and how the good in
a man's spirit will not suffer itself to be overlaid, and rarely or
never deserts him in the hour of need. But we are all for tootling on
the sentimental flute in literature; and not a man among us will go to
the head of the march to sound the heady drums.

It was agreeable upon the river. A barge or two went past laden with
hay. Reeds and willows bordered the stream; and cattle and grey
venerable horses came and hung their mild heads over the embankment.
Here and there was a pleasant village among trees, with a noisy
shipping-yard; here and there a villa in a lawn. The wind served us well
up the Scheldt and thereafter up the Rupel, and we were running pretty
free when we began to sight the brickyards of Boom, lying for a long way
on the right bank of the river. The left bank was still green and
pastoral, with alleys of trees along the embankment, and here and there
a flight of steps to serve a ferry, where perhaps there sat a woman with
her elbows on her knees, or an old gentleman with a staff and silver
spectacles. But Boom and its brickyards grew smokier and shabbier with
every minute; until a great church with a clock, and a wooden bridge
over the river, indicated the central quarters of the town.

Boom is not a nice place, and is only remarkable for one thing: that the
majority of the inhabitants have a private opinion that they can speak
English, which is not justified by fact. This gave a kind of haziness to
our intercourse. As for the Hôtel de la Navigation, I think it is the
worst feature of the place. It boasts of a sanded parlour, with a bar at
one end, looking on the street; and another sanded parlour, darker and
colder, with an empty bird-cage and a tricolor subscription box by way
of sole adornment, where we made shift to dine in the company of three
uncommunicative engineer apprentices and a silent bagman. The food, as
usual in Belgium, was of a nondescript occasional character; indeed, I
have never been able to detect anything in the nature of a meal among
this pleasing people; they seem to peck and trifle with viands all day
long in an amateur spirit: tentatively French, truly German, and somehow
falling between the two.

The empty bird-cage, swept and garnished, and with no trace of the old
piping favourite, save where two wires had been pushed apart to hold its
lump of sugar, carried with it a sort of graveyard cheer. The engineer
apprentices would have nothing to say to us, nor indeed to the bagman;
but talked low and sparingly to one another, or raked us in the gaslight
with a gleam of spectacles. For though handsome lads, they were all (in
the Scots phrase) barnacled.

There was an English maid in the hotel, who had been long enough out of
England to pick up all sorts of funny foreign idioms, and all sorts of
curious foreign ways, which need not here be specified. She spoke to us
very fluently in her jargon, asked us information as to the manners of
the present day in England, and obligingly corrected us when we
attempted to answer. But as we were dealing with a woman, perhaps our
information was not so much thrown away as it appeared. The sex likes to
pick up knowledge and yet preserve its superiority. It is good policy,
and almost necessary in the circumstances. If a man finds a woman admire
him, were it only for his acquaintance with geography, he will begin at
once to build upon the admiration. It is only by unintermittent snubbing
that the pretty ones can keep us in our place. Men, as Miss Howe or Miss
Harlowe would have said, "are such _encroachers_." For my part, I am
body and soul with the women; and after a well-married couple, there is
nothing so beautiful in the world as the myth of the divine huntress. It
is no use for a man to take to the woods; we know him; St. Anthony tried
the same thing long ago, and had a pitiful time of it by all accounts.
But there is this about some women, which overtops the best gymnosophist
among men, that they suffice to themselves, and can walk in a high and
cold zone without the countenance of any trousered being. I declare,
although the reverse of a professed ascetic, I am more obliged to women
for this ideal than I should be to the majority of them, or indeed to
any but one, for a spontaneous kiss. There is nothing so encouraging as
the spectacle of self-sufficiency. And when I think of the slim and
lovely maidens, running the woods all night to the note of Diana's horn;
moving among the old oaks, as fancy-free as they; things of the forest
and the starlight, not touched by the commotion of man's hot and turbid
life--although there are plenty other ideals that I should prefer--I
find my heart beat at the thought of this one. 'Tis to fail in life, but
to fail with what a grace! That is not lost which is not regretted. And
where--here slips out the male--where would be much of the glory of
inspiring love, if there were no contempt to overcome?




ON THE WILLEBROEK CANAL


Next morning, when we set forth on the Willebroek Canal, the rain began
heavy and chill. The water of the canal stood at about the drinking
temperature of tea; and under this cold aspersion the surface was
covered with steam. The exhilaration of departure, and the easy motion
of the boats under each stroke of the paddles, supported us through this
misfortune while it lasted; and when the cloud passed and the sun came
out again, our spirits went up above the range of stay-at-home humours.
A good breeze rustled and shivered in the rows of trees that bordered
the canal. The leaves flickered in and out of the light in tumultuous
masses. It seemed sailing weather to eye and ear; but down between the
banks, the wind reached us only in faint and desultory puffs. There was
hardly enough to steer by. Progress was intermittent and unsatisfactory.
A jocular person, of marine antecedents, hailed us from the tow-path
with a "_C'est vite, mais c'est long_."

The canal was busy enough. Every now and then we met or overtook a long
string of boats, with great green tillers; high sterns with a window on
either side of the rudder, and perhaps a jug or a flower-pot in one of
the windows; a dinghy following behind; a woman busied about the day's
dinner, and a handful of children. These barges were all tied one behind
the other with tow ropes, to the number of twenty-five or thirty; and
the line was headed and kept in motion by a steamer of strange
construction. It had neither paddle-wheel nor screw; but by some gear
not rightly comprehensible to the unmechanical mind, it fetched up over
its bow a small bright chain which lay along the bottom of the canal,
and paying it out again over the stern, dragged itself forward, link by
link, with its whole retinue of loaded skows. Until one had found out
the key to the enigma, there was something solemn and uncomfortable in
the progress of one of these trains, as it moved gently along the water
with nothing to mark its advance but an eddy alongside dying away into
the wake.

Of all the creatures of commercial enterprise, a canal barge is by far
the most delightful to consider. It may spread its sails, and then you
see it sailing high above the tree-tops and the windmill, sailing on the
aqueduct, sailing through the green corn-lands: the most picturesque of
things amphibious. Or the horse plods along at a foot-pace, as if there
were no such thing as business in the world; and the man dreaming at the
tiller sees the same spire on the horizon all day long. It is a mystery
how things ever get to their destination at this rate; and to see the
barges waiting their turn at a lock affords a fine lesson of how easily
the world may be taken. There should be many contented spirits on board,
for such a life is both to travel and to stay at home.

The chimney smokes for dinner as you go along; the banks of the canal
slowly unroll their scenery to contemplative eyes; the barge floats by
great forests and through great cities with their public buildings and
their lamps at night; and for the barge, in his floating home,
"travelling abed," it is merely as if he were listening to another man's
story or turning the leaves of a picture-book in which he had no
concern. He may take his afternoon walk in some foreign country on the
banks of the canal, and then come home to dinner at his own fireside.

There is not enough exercise in such a life for any high measure of
health; but a high measure of health is only necessary for unhealthy
people. The slug of a fellow, who is never ill nor well, has a quiet
time of it in life, and dies all the easier.

I am sure I would rather be a barge than occupy any position under
heaven that required attendance at an office. There are few callings, I
should say, where a man gives up less of his liberty in return for
regular meals. The barge is on shipboard--he is master in his own
ship--he can land whenever he will--he can never be kept beating off a
lee-shore a whole frosty night when the sheets are as hard as iron; and,
so far as I can make out, time stands as nearly still with him as is
compatible with the return of bed-time or the dinner-hour. It is not
easy to see why a barge should ever die.

Half-way between Willebroek and Villevorde, in a beautiful reach of
canal like a squire's avenue, we went ashore to lunch. There were two
eggs, a junk of bread, and a bottle of wine on board the _Arethusa_; and
two eggs and an Etna cooking apparatus on board the _Cigarette_. The
master of the latter boat smashed one of the eggs in the course of
disembarkation; but observing pleasantly that it might still be cooked
_à la papier_, he dropped it into the Etna, in its covering of Flemish
newspaper. We landed in a blink of fine weather; but we had not been two
minutes ashore before the wind freshened into half a gale, and the rain
began to patter on our shoulders. We sat as close about the Etna as we
could. The spirits burned with great ostentation; the grass caught flame
every minute or two, and had to be trodden out; and before long, there
were several burnt fingers of the party. But the solid quantity of
cookery accomplished was out of proportion with so much display; and
when we desisted, after two applications of the fire, the sound egg was
little more than loo-warm; and as for _à la papier_, it was a cold and
sordid _fricassée_ of printer's ink and broken egg-shell. We made shift
to roast the other two, by putting them close to the burning spirits;
and that with better success. And then we uncorked the bottle of wine,
and sat down in a ditch with our canoe aprons over our knees. It rained
smartly. Discomfort, when it is honestly uncomfortable and makes no
nauseous pretensions to the contrary, is a vastly humorous business; and
people well steeped and stupefied in the open air are in a good vein for
laughter. From this point of view, even egg _à la papier_ offered by way
of food may pass muster as a sort of accessory to the fun. But this
manner of jest, although it may be taken in good part, does not invite
repetition; and from that time forward, the Etna voyaged like a
gentleman in the locker of the _Cigarette_.