from the first that he would be called, it will be, not at all among the greatest, no doubt, but among the very best that he will be found. No man among them all-not Scott himself—was more beautifully free from the common faults of the man whose chief business is writing. These letters show him to us snow-pure from any stain of envy, jealousy, or suspicion. He is liberal to profusion in his encouragement of young rivals; he is humble almost to excess when he thinks of his great predecessors. His literary heroes were always those who could play their part in the field as well as in the closet; and, artist as he was every inch of him, he rejoiced, I think, as Scott did, more in a plain piece of public duty done, even, perhaps, in a plot of land reclaimed for man's help or profit, than in striking on a mine of telling incidents, or turning out a score of his felicitous phrases. Perhaps there was something of mistake in this, for, after all, a man's business is to make the most of the one talent-if he is happy enough to have one-in which he surpasses his fellows; and Stevenson knew quite well that his one talent did not lie in the direction of politics or agriculture. But, even so, the mistake was a fine one, and may have saved him from the countless ills that flow from fancying all life and happiness hang on the faultless turning of a phrase. And, at least, while as ready as Scott was to play a man's part whenever occasion served, he never fell into Scott's single affectation, of pretending to be too much of a gentleman to care very greatly how or what he wrote. He never allowed literature to make him forget life; but having once accepted literature as the work of his life, he was loyally, even scrupulously, anxious to do the very best with it that his health and powers would allow.

There are two ways of looking at letters. You may judge them as biography, or material for biography, and you may judge them as literature. They form at the same time a book, that is to say a work of art, and a picture of life. And we can look at them as we please, either from the point of view of the National Gallery or from that of the Gallery of Portraits. If we take the latter, we shall find these letters of Stevenson all that we can ask, as I said. It may, indeed, turn out after a while that Samoan politics do not stand the test of time so well as the Georgian politics of Horace Walpole, or that the novels of Mr. Henry James and Mr. Crockett are hardly subjects of such permanent interest as the books with which Gray or FitzGerald fill their letters. But the public of to-day will not feel that danger; and no public of any day will ever ask for a better subject for letter-writing than Stevenson had in himself. So that on that side, the biographical side, all is for the best here in the best of all possible epistolary worlds. And assuredly no one will expect the letters of Stevenson to fail on the literary side. Nor do they. His

amazing skill in handling that difficult instrument, the English language, is as plain here as it ever was. He can say what he wants, and say it in his own way, which is no one else's way; and to be able to do that was, I believe, Mr. Pater's definition of style. He preaches his own sermon, plays with his own humour, paints his own. picturesque, pours forth his own political harangues, and is all the while mobile or compressed, vigorous or easy, pleasantly wise or pleasantly foolish, as the case may demand; but everywhere the old delightful Stevenson, the man of the uniquely open eye, and of the strangely exact and perfect word. Or rather, not everywhere: for that is just the point to which I was coming. I was going to dare to say that it is on the literary side, if anywhere, that the flaw, such as it is, in this charming collection of letters must be looked for.

Some people, no doubt, wil lobject altogether to any literary criticism being applied to private letters; and others will be confused by the ancient fallacy that the demand for style is a demand for fine writing. The truth is, of course, that fine writing has nothing to do with style, and, indeed, has been more often fatal to it than almost any other literary habit, and that it can be nowhere more out of place than in a letter. A purple patch here and there, like the letter of Sulpicius, passes very well, no doubt, but the bulk of a body of letters must be of a more work-a-day hue. Still, the completest recognition of the undesirability of the ornate in a book of letters does not in the smallest degree affect the fact that when letters appear publicly as a book they must be judged as other books are judged. So long as a letter is merely to pass from the hasty glance of its writer to the hasty glance of its recipient, and so to the oblivion of the waste-paper basket, anything will do, and nothing can come amiss. But when it is to present itself to the public, and ask for a permanent place in a great literature, it is by no means everything that will do. The tests by which literature is tried are then at once applicable, and even indispensable. We then have a right to expect that the private shall have been so treated as to be capable of being public; the personal as if somehow it were also the universal; the occasional as if it partook of the nature of the permanent. Everybody talks slang, but nobody cares to use it for a book. Everybody, who has any blood stirring in his veins, says and does things at home which he would not do before the world in general. And that is just where the difficulty of publishing letters comes in. No one felt more fully than Stevenson that there are in all lives certain private sanctities into which the public ought never to be allowed to intrude. And I believe he would have equally recognised that there are also private tricks and vagaries which ought not to be intruded upon the public. At the moment, and to the friends who see them in a letter, they are pleasant enough; but with the public which sees them on the printed page they are not there for a

moment but for all time, and then the effect is not so pleasant. And if anything prevents Stevenson taking the rank he might have taken among the dii majores of this delightful art of letter-writing, it will be that he has a tiresome way of slipping into slang, and slang is just as fatal to the permanent charm of letters as to any other form of literature. It may leave them very readable, especially with the big public, and for the moment: but that is no assurance of a permanent place among the highest. There are plenty of poems that are more readable than the Paradise Lost. Californian methods of securing liveliness of expression may do a book no harm at the circulating libraries; but if a man is to be of the company of Cowper and FitzGerald, he must write the English language as they wrote it.

The

Some people will ask how a writer of letters is to be natural and like himself if he only writes the purest English, which he is sure not to always talk. The answer is that that is precisely the invariable problem of every kind of art, to appear natural without being so. portrait is to seem flesh and blood while it is stone or canvas; and more than that, it is to seem literal and real while it is imaginative and ideal, it is to seem a photograph while it is a picture. The case is the same with books, and there is an excellent instance of how it works in these very letters. "The trouble of it is," says Stevenson, talking of Treasure Island,” to work it off without oaths. Buccaneers without oaths; bricks without straw." He is thinking, as he says, of the "youth and the fond parient"; but the fact is that the task he speaks of is what literature has everywhere to set itself. Its business is to make Silver seem an absolutely natural buccaneer, although he does not swear; to make Hamlet seem an absolutely natural Prince, although he delivers prolonged soliloquies in blank verse; to make the lions and rats of the Fables seem perfectly natural rats and lions, although they talk the Latin of Phædrus or the French of La Fontaine. Great soldiers, when they are about to engage in a single combat for life or death, do not stay to address each other in eloquent hexameters; yet nothing seems more natural in the enchanted world of Homer. Fat knights, besotted by a long career of drunkenness, are not the people from whom we should look for a perpetual flow of brilliant talk; nor is the foolishness of foolish parsons as a rule a thing unforgetably delightful; yet Falstaff is the most lifelike figure in our literature, and no one will deny Mr. Collins his humbler immortality. "The actual is not the true," as Stevenson writes to Mr. Barrie about the Window in Thrums: "Thomas Haggard affects me as a lie. I beg your pardon; doubtless he was somebody you knew: that leads people so far astray."

It could not be put better. probable, not with the actual.

It is the old story: art deals with the
And it is just the same with letters,

so far as they ever, take a place in literature. They are to seem as easy and natural as talk, but by no means to be so. No one in his senses will suppose that Horace Walpole talked as well as he wrote; yet the impression conveyed by the letters is just that of perfect talk. We seem to sit by and listen to a pleasantly garrulous man pouring forth an endless flow of good stories. The actual talk, we may be sure, would have been as broken and confused and full of excrescences as talk usually is. The difference is that the one is raw material and the other is art. Of course a thousand things may be said in letters which could not be said in a poem or a history; but there are still a great many things which cannot be said, or, at least, cannot be said very often, without leaving an impression of rawness and vulgarity. There are no literary boundaries so wide as the epistolary, but they have their park palings; and the whole art and mystery of letter-writing consists in keeping within them without once so much as seeming aware of their existence. "That's guts if you please," "Lloyd is first chop," "Merivale is a howling cheese," "It bored me hellishly," "I ran like hell," and other things of that sort may be pleasing enough to the original correspondent, but they will not do in a book that is meant to be read fifty years hence.

But that is the worst word, the only unfavourable word, to be said about these delightful volumes. They are a feast of all sorts and conditions of pleasures, and everybody who cares for Stevenson will read every letter, from the first to the last, in a hurry of greedy delight. We see every side of him-the literary side most of all, of course, but they are all there; and few men have ever had so various a personality.

"Divers et ondoyant," as Mr. Colvin says in his admirable introduction, “he seemed to contain within himself a whole troop of singularly assorted characters, the poet and artist, the novelist and preacher, the humourist and jester, the man of great heart and tender conscience, the man of eager appetite and curiosity, the Bohemian impatient of restraints and shams, the adventurer and lover of travel and of action."

And everyone of them is here in these letters. Let me take the poet, for instance, who must always rank first in any company in which he is found. It is true that the poet in Stevenson, though in him from the very first and to the very last, never succeeded in getting out to show himself at all as he should. "The House Beautiful," the "Requiem," the stanzas entitled "In Memoriam F.A.S.," "It is the season now to go," these and half-a-dozen others, perhaps, are all the poet could get uttered in a poet's proper language. But few men have had more of the stuff and matter of poetry in them. Edinburgh or Samoa, the pavements of San Francisco, or the deck of the Janet Nicoll-it was all alike an enchanted world to him. Every fibre of the man's nature responded to that "incommunicable

thrill of things"-his own phrase-which only poets know. Here he is, at the age of twenty-two, lying on a river-bank which is "connected in my mind inseparably with Virgil's Eclogues," and all the way as he went to it he has been "thanking God that He had made me and the birds and everything just as they are and not otherwise for although there was no sun, the air was so thrilled with robins and blackbirds, that it made the heart tremble with joy.” Or again:

"I have been walking to-day by a colonnade of beeches along the brawling Allan. My character for sanity is quite gone, seeing that I cheered my lonely way with the following in a triumphant chaunt : 'Thank God for the grass, and the fir-trees, and the crows and the sheep, and the sunshine and the shadows of the fir-trees.' I hold that he is a poor mean devil who can walk alone in such a place and in such weather, and doesn't set up his lungs and cry back to the birds and the river. Follow, follow, follow me. Come hither, come hither, come hither, here shall you see-no enemy-except a very slight remnant of winter and its rough weather. My bedroom, when I awoke this morning, was full of bird-songs, which is the greatest pleasure in life."

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That is the real Stevenson, the man of the open air, and sea, and heather; the man who saw life on its healthy, happy, heroic side; the creator of Alan Breck, not the author of The Wrecker. Of all the pleasant things that are to be found in these letters, there is none pleasanter to find than that he himself knew the difference between these two. One used to wonder whether he wrote such a thing as The Pavilion on the Links with just as much pleasure as The Treasure of Franchard. We now know he did not. Carpentry, of course, but not bad at that," he calls The Pavilion. Few men, in fact, have over had a surer instinct about their own work than he. He knew that The Black Arrow was his one absolute failure. "I find few greater pleasures than reading my own works, but I never, oh, I never read The Black Arrow." And he knew that Weir of Hermiston was, so far as it had gone, his one absolute success. The thought that it was so made the happiness of those last hours which he did not know were to be the last. The Wrecker he calls "rude transpontine business" and is half ashamed to send it to Mr. Henry James: "It's a machine, you know-don't expect aught else—a machine, and a police machine." He naturally thought far better of The Ebb Tide, but nevertheless says of it: "If the admirers of Zola admire him for his ugliness and pessimism, I think they should admire this." And he puts his finger on the weakness of St. Ives: "A tissue of adventures, the central character not very well done, no philosophic pith under the yarn." He might have added that that dreadful "funny" servant is the one prominent personage in all his books whom nobody has ever believed in for a moment. Of the great Alan,. surely his greatest creation, he does not seem to have been quite so proud as he ought to have been. But he did not underrate