580 Professor Walter Raleigh [May 17, 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 



Friday, May 17, 1895. 



Basil Woodd Smith, Esq. F.R.A.S. F.S.A. Vice-President, 

 in the Chair. 



Professor Walter Raleigh. 



Robert Louis Stevenson. 



When a popular writer dies, the question it has become the fashion 

 with a nervous generation to ask, is the question, " Will he live ? " 

 There is no idler question, none more hopelessly impossible and 

 unprofitable to answer. It is one of the many vanities of criticism 

 to promise immortality to the authors that it praises, to patronise a 

 writer with the assurance that our great-grandchildren, whose time 

 and tastes are thus frivolously mortgaged, will read his works with 

 delight. But " there is no antidote against the opium of time, which 

 temporally considereth all things : our fathers find their graves in 

 our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our 

 survivors." Let us make sure that our sons will care for Homer 

 before we pledge a more distant generation to a newer cult. 



Nevertheless, without handling the prickly question of literary 

 immortality, it is easy to recognise that the literary reputation of 

 Robert Louis Stevenson is made of good stuff. His fame has spread, 

 as lasting fame is wont to do, from the few to the many. Fifteen 

 years ago his essays and fanciful books of travel were treasured by a 

 small and discerning company of admirers ; long before he chanced 

 to fell the British public with ' Treasure Island ' and ' Dr. Jekyll 

 and Mr. Hyde ' he had shown himself a delicate marksman. And 

 although large editions are nothing, standard editions, richly furnished 

 and complete, are worthy of remark. Stevenson is one of the very 

 few authors in our literary history who have been honoured during 

 their lifetime by the appearance of such an edition ; the best of his 

 public, it would seem, do not only wish to read his works, but to 

 possess them, and all of them, at the cost of many pounds, in library 

 form. It would be easy to mention more voluminous and more 

 popular authors than Stevenson whose publishers could not find five 

 subscribers for an adventure like this. He has made a brave begin- 

 ning in that race against Time which all must lose. 



It is not in the least necessary, after all, to fortify ourselves with 

 the presumed consent of our poor descendants, who may have a world 

 of other business to attend to, in order to establish Stevenson in 

 the position of a great writer. Let us leave that foolish trick to the 

 politicians, who never claim that they are right — merely that they 

 will win at the next elections. Literary criticism has standards other 



