1911] on Robert Louis Stevenson . 47 



niulor the strain of unnatural hatred whicli he cannot choose but 

 cherisli against his brother. (This, let me remark in passing, is a 

 good instance of that refusal to sentimentalise which we have noted 

 in Stevenson. A weaker writer would have shirked this painful issue, 

 and given us in the end a common-place trinmph of the just brother 

 over the unjust, the injured over the injurer). 



One of the points on which Professor Raleigh dwelt in his lecture 

 here sixteen years ago, was the richness of Stevenson's fiction in this kind 

 of apt and bracing life-wisdom. We find it uttered by his characters 

 now gravely and now lightly : now l)y the warning Cassandra-lips of 

 the passionate Scottish nurse, now l)y the houseless poet-thief in the 

 Paris winter night, or again by the broken sailorman, Dick Arblaster, 

 ill the Yorkshire harbour, or by the lovable vain and valiant High- 

 lander in the flight across the moors, or the brilliant, ineffectual, 

 self-distrusting Prince in the miller's cottage. There are some, 

 perhaps there are many, of Stevenson's readers who prefer the same 

 quality of life-wisdom gay, or stern, where they find it unmixed with 

 the elements of fiction, and uttered not by the puppets in his tales, 

 however much in character and with whatever grace or quaintness of 

 dialect, but straight from his own lips and with a more direct savour 

 of his own personality. Such readers turn by preference to his 

 essays and letters. 



As to the quality of the essays, there has been no doulit amongst 

 sane judges since they began to appear in the " Cornhill Magazine," 

 under the editorship of Sir Leslie Stephen, five and thirty years ago. 

 Whether they revivify and enkindle to our imagination world-old 

 truths like that of the courage of the human race in face of the immi- 

 nence of death, as in " Aes Triplex " ; or whether they plead with 

 grown people for a better understanding of the thoughts of children, 

 to whom their imaginations are so much more true and important 

 than facts, as in " Child's Play " ; whether they strike light into the 

 essential relations of art to life, like " The Lantern Bearers " or " A 

 Gossip on Romance," or call up figures out of his own past like those 

 of the Scotch gardener or the shepherd John Tod, or face some of 

 the great problems of good and evil and human destiny like " Pulvis 

 et Umbra " or " A Christmas Sermon," they always hold one by the 

 same charni, the charm of vivid, sincere, and human thinking — think- 

 ing done with heart and brain together — the charm of illuminating 

 imagery, of turns of phrase that are a perpetual delight and stimulus 

 alike to our sense of words and our sense of things, and by a har- 

 monious movement and sequence of clauses and sentences which 

 dance one down the argument like the ripple of a full, clear brook — 

 clear, but in its clearness holding more things and deeper than it 

 quite reveals. 



They have the further charm that in them Stevenson lets us see 

 much, though never obtrusively or too familiarly, of himself : of a. 

 personality, that is, certainly one of the most interesting and inspiring 



