First, we note the Titanic nature of Mr. Henley's selfconfidence. The public, following certain authorities and its own recollections, conceives a picture of Stevenson; Mr. Balfour takes the same view; it is also the view which Stevenson took of himself. Mr. Henley will not have it. Has he forgotten that analysis of man into "three Johns"? Will there not be besides the world's Lewis (a thing of actions and appearances), Lewis's own Lewis (a thing of secrets and of aspirations), and behind them both the real Lewis, known only to his Maker? And in our attempt to shadow forth to ourselves something of that unapproachable reality, are we to regard only the outward Lewis, and not the inward at all? Granting, as we are prepared to grant, that the man's life was often inconsistent, full of acts which rudely jarred with his ideal, are we to believe that that ideal was no true part of him? Strictly, no doubt, we can hardly claim that we know what a man knows of his own character; but there are exceptional cases, and surely if a man ever let the world into his confidence, Stevenson did so, intentionally and unintentionally.

"Make-believe," says Mr. Henley. "No better histrion ever lived." Is this serious? Human nature is a various thing, but have we any record of a man, passionately interested in himself, who throughout his life was much before his fellows' eyes, and always acting a part which had no connection with any aspect of that self? Can we not guess something, even from the choice of clothes?

But, we are told, he did not act one part throughout; he changed there were indeed two Stevensons, one before '87, one after; Mr. Henley loved the first, did not esteem the second. And then we have an admission: "My relation to him was that of a man with a grievance." Is a grievance, in Mr. Henley's opinion, a safe standpoint from which to judge of changes in the griever's character? That character changes, no doubt, to the grieved one's view; but is not this well-known phenomenon generally regarded by the rest of the world, who do not share the grievance, as a subjective illusion?

"This change," says Mr. Henley, 66 was visible to more than one before it was fully revealed to me." As the more than one are not called by name we will not stop to inquire whether they, too, had grievances. We will rather look into the nature of the alleged change. It is this. Stevenson, who had been a very masculine creature, became a Shorter Catechist, an Anxious Egotist, one who would do good unhandsomely; who, to salve his conscience for an injustice done by him, would give money in place of an apology; who, even in giving, would be mean enough to limit his gift. Have the cases here hinted at any connection with the grievance already mentioned? Did they, at any rate, occur within Mr. Henley's own experience? Did his view of Stevenson's manner of giving change at the same time as his view of the whole character-at the time, in fact, of the grievance ?

Finally, Mr. Henley asks to be allowed to "live and die uninsulted, as we lived and died before Stevenson's books began to sell and his personality was a marketable thing.” What was the nature of these insults, by whom offered, and to whom? and in what way did the launching of these insults coincide with Stevenson's success as an author and an earner of money? Is it possible that Mr. Henley wishes to contendwe can see no other way of taking his words-that the popularity of Stevenson's books with the public in some way constituted an insult to Mr. Henley and those whom he groups with himself under that mysterious "we"?

These are pregnant questions, and upon the answer to them hangs in a great measure our belief in Mr. Henley's credibility as an impartial witness. They arise so naturally, and indeed inevitably, out of a close consideration of his own words, that we can but wonder at his leaving his readers under the necessity of putting them. How much more convincing he would have made his evidence if he had prefaced it by a plain affirmation that in all this tangle of conflicting moralities his personal feelings were nowhere involved. We do not say that Mr. Henley could not make such a statement, or that he

cannot still make it: we do say that until he has given a satisfactory answer to the doubts which he has himself raised, the public has the right to consider the value of his evidence as seriously discounted.

Further though this is less important-we believe that Mr. Henley would have been listened to with greater respect if he had refrained, in discussing Stevenson's wit, from using of his dead friend the word "buffoon" and those which follow it, and if, in speaking of Stevenson's music, he had not gone far out of his way to describe in harsh terms a hypothetical failure which Stevenson never risked. The words "uninspired, uninteresting and superfluous" seem less applicable to Stevenson's music than to a criticism of what it would have been under purely imaginary circumstances. It is in the same uninspired vein that Mr. Henley protests on his last page against "this crawling astonishment-this voluble admiration" with which the world praises Stevenson "for that, being a stricken man, he would live out his life." A shirtmaker who works to the last is more than his equal, says Mr. Henley. Surely this is less than fair. In praising Stevenson we do no wrong to other stout souls who die in harness; but he did more than struggle to the end for daily bread or for love of his work. Not merely at the moment of his death, but for years before, he stood as it were in the flame, playing the man, and speaking words of great encouragement to all who must suffer. The candle that he lit is not our only light of courage; it is not perhaps so bright as others in our history, but it is one which will not easily be put out, though all the dead man's friends stood round it blowing hot and cold.

Such then is Mr. Henley's case: the witnesses for the defence are many, but we need not call them, for they have given their evidence already, and Mr. Henley has himself admitted the competence of some at any rate among them. "Mr. Sidney Colvin," for example, "contributed to The Dictionary of National Biography a model summary of Stevenson's life and achievement." We may add that he also gave to the

world in the last sixteen pages of his "Introduction" to Stevenson's Letters a less summary but still more subtle and exhaustive account of Stevenson's character: an account which is much to the point here, for while it clashes with Mr. Henley's very little on points of fact, the result of the interpretation differs as cloudy opal from common soot. Now in a letter to the Press dated November 30, 1901, Mr. Colvin adds to his previous testimony these words:

Later on, when the present dust has died down, I shall have my last word to say. It will be that of both an earlier and a later friend of Stevenson's than Mr. Henley was, and one whose intimacy with him was at no time broken by misunderstanding. Meantime, the public will do wisely not to let the image they had previously formed of him from his books and his letters be disturbed.

This is our hope also, and our sole object in treating of a painful question in which we have no personal interest. It is no part of our case to defend one man of letters by attacking another : we have sought only to show that Mr. Henley's evidence is weakened by his own admission of a grievance, his own complaint of insults received but not specified, his own manifest prejudice and irrelevancy, which appear, to us at least, no less evident because mingled here and there with laudatory phrases which even "the worser spirit" has been unable to refuse. Whatever may have been the causes which prompted him to come forward on this occasion, we feel sure that one among them—and it is the one on which we prefer to dwell-is an erroneous idea of what the public estimate of Stevenson really is. Not one man or woman in a thousand, we venture to think, looks upon Stevenson as a second Shakespeare, or his books as superior to "Esmond" or "Pickwick "; not one in a thousand is under any temptation to regard him as "an angel clean from Heaven," not one but knows well enough that of his life, as of all lives, a great part "will never get writteneven by me" as Mr. Henley says; but though we may agree that the unwritten and unwritable part is very possibly "the most interesting," we do not think the verdict of his fellow

men would ever pronounce it "the best." It has long since been noted that, in the analysis of character, love will sometimes give truer results than a more acid test: the Englishspeaking world loved Stevenson, of whom it sufficiently knows the best, and can sufficiently infer the worst: as to both best and worst it will probably continue to disagree with Mr. Henley.