1895.] on Robert Louis Stevenson. 599 



charity. In real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is not 

 valued ; it is received from the hand of friendship, or it is resented. 

 We are all too proud to take a naked gift ; we must seem to pay it, 

 if in nothing else, then with the delights of our society. Here, then, 

 is the pitiful fix of the rich man ; here is that needle's eye in which 

 he stuck already in the days of Christ, and still sticks to-day, firmer, 

 if possible, than ever ; that he has the money, and lacks the love 

 which should make his money acceptable. Here and now, just as of 

 old in Palestine, he has the rich to dinner, it is with the rich that 

 he takes his pleasure : and when his turn comes to be charitable, he 

 looks in vain for a recipient. His friends are not poor, they do not 

 want ; the poor are not his friends, they will not take. To whom is 

 he to give ? Where to find — note this phrase — the Deserving Poor ? 

 Charity is (what they call) centralised ; offices are hired ; societies 

 founded, with secretaries paid or unpaid : the hunt of the Deserving 

 Poor goes merrily forward. I think it will take a more than merely 

 human secretary to disinter that character. What ! a class that is to 

 be in want from no fault of its own, and yet greedily eager to receive 

 from strangers ! and to be quite respectable, and at the same time 

 quite devoid of self-respect ; and play the most delicate part of friend- 

 ship, and yet never be seen ; and wear the form of man, and yet fly 

 in the face of all the laws of human nature : — and all this, in the 

 hope of getting a belly-god burgess through a needle's eye ! Oh, let 

 him stick, by all means ; and let his polity tumble in the dust ; and 

 let his epitaph and all his literature (of which my own works begin 

 to form no inconsiderable part) be abolished even from the history 

 of man ! For a fool of this monstrosity of dulness there can be no 

 salvation ; and the fool who looked for the elixir of life was an angel 

 of reason to the fool who looks for the Deserving Poor." 



An equal sense of the realities of life and death gives the force 

 of a natural law to the pathos of ' Old Mortality,' that essay in which 

 Stevenson pays passionate tribute to the memory of his early friend, 

 who " had gone to ruin with a kingly abandon, like one who con- 

 descended ; but once ruined, with the lights all out, he fought as for a 

 kingdom." The whole description, down to the marvellous quotation 

 from Bunyan that closes it, is one of the sovereign passages of modern 

 literature ; the pathos of it is pure and elemental, like the rush of a 

 cleansing wind, or the onset of the legions commanded by 



" The mighty Mahmud, Allah -breathing Lord, 

 That all the misbelieving and black Horde 



Of Fears and Sorrows that infest the Soul 

 Scatters before him with his whirlwind Sword." 



Lastly, to bring to an end this imperfect review of the works of 

 a writer who has left none greater behind him, Stevenson excels at 

 what is perhaps the most delicate of literary tasks and the utmost test, 

 where it is successfully encountered, of nobility, — the practice, namely, 

 of self-revelation and self-delineation. To talk much about oneself 



2 s 2 



