romance in his life sprang from his adventurous and Bohemian spirit and his long search for health. He travelled a great deal, on foot, by canoe, and with a donkey, in Scotland, Belgium, and France. He went to America in 1879, making the ocean voyage in a second cabin little better than steerage, and the trip across the continent to San Francisco in an emigrant train. The next year he married and returned to England. In 1887 he went again to America and shortly afterward began to cruise among the picturesque islands of the Pacific. Finally, in 1890, he bought the estate of Vailima, situated on a mountain-side in the island of Samoa. There he made his home and entered upon the friendliest of relations with the natives, to whom he stood in some sort as a father. Four years later, though his health had seemed much improved, he suddenly died. He was buried by the Samoan chieftains on the summit of Mount Vaea, overlooking the harbor of Apia. Directly out of this wandering life grew many of Stevenson's books-among the earlier, An Inland Voyage (1878) and Travels with a Donkey (1879), among the later, Across the Plains, In the South Seas, A Footnote to History (all 1892), and Vailima Letters (1895). Besides these personal memoirs he wrote several volumes of general and critical essays, Virginibus Puerisque (1881) and Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882), some poems, particularly A Child's Garden of Verses (1885), and a large number of romances. Among the last, the highly romantic and sometimes blood-curdling Treasure Island (1882) is best known. Others are Prince Otto (1885), Kidnapped (1886), and David Balfour (1893), The Merry Men (1887), The Master of Ballantrae (1889), and Island Nights' Entertainments (1893). With the exception of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), a study in dual personality hardly in Stevenson's manner, his romances have one general character, that of wild adventure, often by sea, with few or no female personages and little of the element of romantic love. Stevenson's wide popularity is largely due to the fact that he was, as Pater was not, a man of the world. He was less concerned with the subtle impressions made on the sensitiveplate of the mind than with the infinitely livelier impressions made on the sensitive retina of the eye. His world was the world of action and events. He usually had a story to tell,* and this alone would have assured him of a large audience. But he had, in addition, the faculty of telling his story well. Indeed, the name of Stevenson stands in literature for a style quite as much as for anything. The style, he tells us, was a product of much study and practice and of the imitation of various masters, yet with all its artificiality its mechanism is quite concealed; one comes to know it without knowing how. It shares with Pater's the quality of fastidiousness and avoidance of the stereotyped, but does not push this refinement so far. It is less academic, more racy, as befits the very different purpose it is made to serve. Though difficult to describe, it is easy to illustrate, since the flavor of it lurks in almost every sentence. Take, from Travels with a Donkey, this sequel of a night spent in the open air: "I was soon on the road nibbling a cake of chocolate and seriously occupied with a case of conscience. Was I to pay for my night's lodging? I had slept ill, the bed was full of fleas in the shape of ants, there was no water in the room, the very dawn had neglected to call me in the morning. I might have missed a train, had there been any in the neighborhood to catch. Clearly, I was dissatisfied with my entertainment; and I decided I should not pay unless I met a beggar. "The valley looked even lovelier by morning; and soon the road descended to the level of the river. Here, in a place where many straight and prosperous chestnuts stood together, making an aisle upon a swarded terrace, I made my morning toilette in the water of the Tarn. It was marvellously clear, thrillingly cool; the soap-suds disappeared as if by magic in the swift current, and the white boulders gave one a model for cleanliness. To wash in one of God's rivers in the open air seems to me a sort of cheerful solemnity or semi-pagan act of worship. To dabble among dishes in a bedroom may perhaps make clean the body; but the imagination takes no share in such a *Tusitala ("teller of tales") is the name which was given him by the Samoan natives. cleansing. I went on with a light and peaceful heart, and sang psalms to the spiritual ear as I advanced. alms. "Suddenly up came an old woman, who point-blank demanded "'Good!' thought I; 'here comes the waiter with the bill.' "And I paid for my night's lodging on the spot. Take it how you please, but this was the first and the last beggar that I met with during all my tour." A quality seldom to be dissociated from style is personality. The personality of Stevenson is nearly as marked in its way as that of Charles Lamb, and is nearly as delightful. "Extreme busyness," he declares in one of his essays, "whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity." In this sentence he has almost summed up his own character-his wide curiosity, his buoyant spirits, his unfailing good-fellowship. Pater, we have said, was a humanist, but so was Stevenson, in a very different and more vital sense of the word. Few men have shown a heartier willingness to "breast into the world" and rub off the angularities of character in the face of all sorts of discouragement. There are those who have suspected something of pose in this disposition, just as it is easy to suspect a pose in the preciosity of Stevenson's style. But even if we grant it, it would be uncharitable to call such bravado, so infectious and salutary in its influence, by any other name than virtue. Only in this spirit of charity is it possible to read the beautiful Requiem which he wrote, and which is now engraved on his granite tomb: "Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. And I laid me down with a will. And the hunter home from the hill." CONCLUSION From the seventh century to the verge of the twentieth; from semi-barbarous Britain to Christian England; from Northumbria to Wessex, from Wessex to London, from London again to the forests of Nottingham, to the lakes of Westmoreland and Cumberland, to Ayrshire, to Edinburgh, to almost every corner of the island kingdom, and finally to a mountain tomb in a far-away island of the South Seas, we have followed the literary record of the English race. Through all its changing forms and faiths, certain characteristics have remained the same. Through Teutonic paganism and Roman Christianity, through Norman feudalism and Celtic romance, through the Renaissance humanism of the sixteenth century, the Puritanism of the seventeenth, the deism of the eighteenth, the mingled individualism and socialism of the nineteenth, may be traced with remarkable distinctness those traits of character which have shaped the ideals and destinies of the people. Among these are an indomitable will and courage to act, a passionate devotion to freedom tempered by a wholesome respect for law, a religious regard for moral purity and humble worth, and a genuine love for external nature in all her aspects, from the formal beauty of lawn and garden to the rugged grandeur of mountain and sea. One and the same spirit informs the epic of those early unknown bards who chanted the deeds of their fathers by the stern North Ocean and the requiem of the modern singer who goes to meet death among tropic palms. If the record has seemed to close abruptly, it is because there is no real conclusion. It stops, but does not end. Even the nineteenth century, in its literary history, is seen to return upon itself like a cycle. Not very unlike the romanticism which marked the beginning is that which attends the close. The romances of Scott find a counterpart in the tales of his compatriot Stevenson. From the dream-land of Coleridge, now lighted as by rainbows, now dark with mists, the step is not great to the dream-world of Rossetti, "forlorn of light." Wordsworth's exalted worship of nature is echoed in Tennyson's more sentimental love. The revolutionary idealism and the lyricism of Shelley reappear in the republicanism and the virtuosity of Swinburne. The religion of beauty promulgated by Keats survives in the æsthetic cult of a school. But even thus, not all the story of the last century has been told. There are moods and tendencies not accounted for here because their chief exponents are still alive, or because their significance may not be clearly defined. Sir Leslie Stephen, perhaps the foremost of the later critics, has just passed away, but no term can be pointed to the kind of activity for which he stood, and which appears to be steadily gathering momentum. In fiction, two divergent tendencies have long been represented by the very diverse personalities of Mr. George Meredith and Mr. Thomas Hardy, the one a satiric psychologist of complex and conventional life, the other a tragic realist of pastoral fold and furrow. Others might easily be named. An entire school of Scotch novelists has threatened to supplant Stevenson; and the preciosity of Pater is undergoing new metamorphoses beneath the hands of Mr. Maurice Hewlett. Perhaps the newest note has been struck by Mr. Rudyard Kipling, whose virile and unconventional tales, brought first from India, are like a fresh revelation of Britain's imperial greatness. Mr. Kipling has proved also a new force in poetry, restoring to it a barbaric energy of rhythm and preaching a gospel of almost brute strength and courage. He has left easily the deepest mark on the rising generation. The more academic poetry finds its foremost representative in the meditative muse of Mr. William Watson; while Mr. Stephen Phillips is cultivating poetical drama with a zeal that is rewarded both in the study and on the stage. Finally |