1911] on Robert Louis Stevenson. 51 



towns and sleeping farmhouses and cottages, all the world over, here 

 by the white road poplar-lined, there by the clamorous surf. Isn't 

 that a good dormitive ? " 



From his chalet at Hyeres, 1883 : — 



" I am very quiet ; a person passing by my door half startles me ; 

 but I enjoy the most wonderful view into a moonlit garden. By 

 day this garden fades into nothing, overpowered by its surroundings 

 and the luminous distance ; but at night and when the moon is out, 

 that garden, the arbour, the flight of stairs that mount the artificial 

 hillock, the plumed blue gum-trees that hang trembling, become the 

 very skirts of Paradise. Angels I know frequent it ; and it thrills 

 all night with the flutes of silence." 



From a hotel at Royat, 1884 : — 



" I read for the first time ' Captain Singleton ' ; it has points ; 

 and then I re-read ' Colonel Jack ' with ecstasy ; the first part is as 

 much superior to ' Robinson Crusoe ' as Robinson is to ' The Inland 

 Voyage.' It is pretty, good, philosophical, dramatic, and as picturesque 

 as a promontory goat in a gale of wind." 



So much for Stevenson as a poet in prose. Let us end with a 

 few words on his gift as a poet in verse. The highest pitched and 

 most imaginative things he had to say did not, as we have seen, 

 express themselves naturally in that form. The things which it came 

 natural to him to say in the regular rhythms of verse were things 

 nearer at hand, more everyday and simple, and the rhythms in which 

 they clothed themselves to his mind's ear were plain and not much 

 polished. He scarcely claimed for them the character of poetry at 

 all, and was apt to insist on the fact that they must be taken not as 

 song but as speech. And yet he loved them, and many of his readers 

 love them too, and find much that is most characteristic of the man 

 expressed in them very movingly and quite tunefully enough. Of 

 the " Child's Glarden " there is no need to speak : or if we speak of 

 it at all let us do so by reminding ourselves of his own words written 

 to a friend when he first held the book in his hand : — 



" They look ghastly in the cold light of print ; but there is some- 

 thing nice in the little ragged regiment for all that : the blackguards 

 seem to me to smile, to have a kind of childish treble note that sounds 

 in my ears freshly ; not song, if you will, but a child's voice." 



It is because we hear in them a child's voice truly, speaking by 

 instinct and without effort, that they are and will remain rootedly 

 endeared both to children and to their elders. And that they are so 

 belongs to a special grace in Stevenson's nature, a grace which no 

 man can acquire by prayer or fasting, still less by trying or pretend- 

 ing, be he a post-impressionist painter or another ; the grace that the 

 childish soul and the childish vision never perished in him, but were 

 always latent in some corner of his being, quite freshly alive and ready 

 to awake ; that there never was a time in his life when he had to say 

 with St. Augustine, " Behold my childhood is dead, but I am alive." 



Hear him again about one of his other modes of verse. " You 



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