1895.] ." on Bobert Louis Stevenson, 583 



whim, gave him, what many a modem writer sadly lacks, plenty to 

 restrain, an exuberant field for self-denial. Here was an opportunity 

 for art and labour ; the luxuriance of the virgin forests of the West 

 may be clipped and pruned for a lifetime with no fear of reducing 

 them to the trim similitude of a Dutch garden. His bountiful and 

 generous nature could profit by a spell of training that would emaciate 

 a poorer stock. From the first, his delight in earth and the earth- 

 born wasjkeen and multiform ; his zest in life 



" . . . put a spirit of youth in everything, 

 That heavy Saturn^laughed and leaped with him ; " 



and his fancy, light and quick as a child's, made of the world around 

 him an enchanted pleasance. The realism, as it is called, that deals 

 only with the banalities and squalors of life, and weaves into the mesh 

 of its story no character but would make you yawn if you passed ten 

 minutes with him in a railway carriage, might well take a lesson 

 from this man, if it had the brains. Picture to yourself (it is not 

 hard) an average suburb of London. The long rows of identical 

 bilious brick houses, with the inevitable lace curtains, a symbol 

 merely of the will and power to wash ; the awful nondescript object, 

 generally under glass, in the front window — the shrine of the un- 

 known god of art ; the sombre invariable citizen, whose garb gives 

 no suggestion of his occupation or his tastes — a person, it would 

 seem, only by courtesy ; the piano-organ the music of the day, and 

 the hideous voice of the vendor of halfpenny papers the music of the 

 night ; could anything be less promising than such a row of houses 

 for the theatre of romance ? Set a realist to walk down one of these 

 streets : he will inquire about milk bills and servants' wages, latch- 

 keys and Sunday avocations, and come back with a tale of small 

 meannesses and petty respectabilities written in the approved modern 

 fashion. Yet Stevenson, it seems likely, could not pass along such 

 a line of brick bandboxes without having his pulses set a-throbbing 

 by the imaginative possibilities of the place. Of his own Lieutenant 

 Brackenbury Rich he says : — 



" The succession of faces in the lamplight stirred the lieutenant's 

 imagination ; and it seemed to him as if he could walk for ever in 

 that stimulating city atmosphere and surrounded by the mystery of 

 four million private lives. He glanced at the houses and marvelled 

 what was passing behind those warmly lighted windows ; he looked 

 into face after face, and saw them each intent upon some unknown 

 interest, criminal or kindly." 



It was that same evening that Prince Florizel's friend, under the 

 name of Mr. Morris, was giving a party in one of the houses of West 

 Kensington. In one at least of the houses of that brick wilderness 

 human spirits were being tested as on an anvil, and most of them 

 tossed aside. So also, in ' The Rajah's Diamond,' it was a quiet 

 suburban garden that witnessed the sudden apparition of Mr. Harry 

 Hartley and his treasures precipitated over the wall ; it was in the 



2 e 2 



