and constantly touching-in this association peculiarly restrictive conditions with the sion of high spirits and romantic accidents a kind of honorably picturesque career. r. Stevenson is, however, distinctly, in spite his occasional practice of the gruesome, frank optimist, an observer who not only ves life, but does not shrink from the reonsibility of recommending it. There is a stematic brightness in him which testifies to is and which is, after all, but one of the inumerable ingenuities of patience. What is markable in his case is that his productions ould constitute an exquisite expression, a ort of whimsical gospel, of enjoyment. The nly difference between " An Inland Voyage," r"Travels with a Donkey" and "The New rabian Nights," or "Treasure Island," or Kidnapped," is, that in the later books the njoyment is reflective,- though it stimulates pontaneity with singular art, whereas in the rst two it is natural and, as it were, historical. These little histories-the first volumes, if I istake not, that introduced Mr. Stevenson to overs of good writing-abound in charming lustrations of his disposition to look at the world as a not exactly refined, but glorified, acified Bohemia. They narrate the quest of Dersonal adventure-on one occasion in a Canoe on the Sambre and the Oise, and on another at a donkey's tail over the hills and alleys of the Cévennes. I well remember that when I read them, in their novelty, upward of ten years ago, I seemed to see the author, unknown as yet to fame, jump before my eyes nto a style. His steps in literature presumably ad not been many; yet he had mastered his form-it had in these cases, perhaps, more substance than his matter - and a singular air of literary experience. It partly, though not completely, explains the phenomenon, that he had already been able to write the exquisite little story of "Will of the Mill," published previously to "An Inland Voyage," and now republished in the volume of "The Merry Men"; for in " Will of the Mill" there is something exceedingly rare, poetical, and unexpected, with that most fascinating quality a work of imagination can have, a dash of alternative mystery as to its meaning, an air-the air of life itself-of half inviting, half defying, you to interpret. This brief but finished composition stood in the same relation to the usual "magazine story" that a glass of Johannisberg occupies to a draught of table d'hôte vin ordinaire. men upon them, looking down and smiling so curious at the water, and living folks leaning their elbows on the wall and looking over too. And then it goes on and on, and down through marshes and sands, until at last it falls into the sea, where the ships are that bring parrots and tobacco from the Indies." It is impossible not to open one's eyes at such a paragraph as that, especially if one has taken a common texture for granted. Will of the Mill spends his life in the valley through which the river runs, and through which, year after year, post-chaises and wagons, and pedestrians, and once an army, "horse and foot, cannon and timbrel, drum and standard," take their way, in spite of the dreams he has once had of seeing the mysterious world, and it is not till death comes that he goes on his travels. He ends by keeping an inn, where he converses with many more initiated spirits, and though he is an amiable man, he dies a bachelor, having broken off, with more plainness than he would have used had he been less untraveled,—of course he remains sadly provincial,- his engagement to the parson's daughter. The story is in the happiest key, and suggests all kinds of things, but what does it in particular represent? The advantage of waiting, perhaps the valuable truth, that, one by one, we tide over our impatiences. There are sagacious people who hold that if one does n't answer a letter it ends by answering itself. So the sub-title of Mr. Stevenson's tale might be "The Beauty of Procrastination." If you don't indulge your curiosities your slackness itself makes at last a kind of rich element, and it comes to very much the same thing in the end. When it came to the point, poor Will had not even the curiosity to marry; and the author leaves us in stimulating doubt as to whether he judges him too selfish or only too philosophic. I find myself speaking of Mr. Stevenson's last volume (at the moment I write) before I have spoken, in any detail, of its predecessors, which I must let pass as a sign that I lack space for a full enumeration. I may mention two more of his productions as completing the list of those that have a personal reference. "The Silverado Squatters" describes a picnicking episode, undertaken on grounds of health, on a mountain-top in California; but this free sketch, which contains a hundred humorous touches, and in the figure of Irvine Lovelands one of Mr. Stevenson's most veracious portraits, is perhaps less vivid, as it is certainly less painful, than those other pages in which, some years ago, he commemorated the twelvemonth he spent in America - the history of a journey from New York to San Francisco in an emigrant-train, performed as the sequel to a voyage across the Atlantic in the same severe conditions. He has never Mr. George Meredith. It is perhaps the most literary of his works, but it is not the most natural. It is one of those coquetries, as we may call them for want of a better word, which may be observed in Mr. Stevenson's activitya kind of artful inconsequence. It is easy to believe that if his strength permitted him to be a more abundant writer he would still more frequently play this eminently literary trickthat of dodging off in a new direction-upon those who might have fancied they knew all about him. I made the reflection, in speaking of "Will of the Mill," that there is a kind of anticipatory malice in the subject of that fine story; as if the writer had intended to say to his reader, "You will never guess, from the unction with which I describe the life of a man who never stirred five miles from home, that I am destined to make my greatest hits in treating of the rovers of the deep." Even here, however, the author's characteristic irony would have come in; for-the rare chances of life being what he most keeps his eye on-the uncommon belongs as much to the way the inquiring Will sticks to his doorsill as to the incident, say, of John Silver and his men, when they are dragging Jim Haw kins to his doom, hearing, in the still woods of Treasure Island, the strange hoot of the made his points better than in that half-hu- given the reins to his high appreciation of morous, half-tragical recital, nor given a more striking instance of his talent for reproducing the feeling of queer situations and contacts. It is much to be regretted that this little masterpiece has not been brought to light a second time, as also that he has not given the world as I believe he came very near doing- his observations in the steerage of an Atlantic liner. If, as I say, our author has a taste for the impressions of Bohemia, he has been very consistent and has not shrunk from going far afield in search of them. And as I have already been indiscreet, I may add that if it has been his fate to be converted in fact from the sardonic view of matrimony, this occurred under an influence which should have the particular sympathy of American readers. He went to California for his wife; and Mrs. Stevenson, as appears moreover by the titlepage of the work, has had a hand-evidently a light and practiced one -in "The Dynamiter," the second series, characterized by a rich extravagance, of "The New Arabian Nights." "The Silverado Squatters" is the history of a honeymoon-prosperous, it would seem, putting Irvine Lovelands aside, save for the death of dog Chuchu "in his teens, after a life so shadowed and troubled, continually shaken with alarms, and the tear of elegant sentiment permanently in his eye." Mr. Stevenson has a theory of composition in regard to the novel, on which he is to be congratulated, as any positive and genuine conviction of this kind is vivifying so long as it is not narrow. The breath of the novelist's being is his liberty; and the incomparable virtue of the form he uses is that it lends itself to views innumerable and diverse, to every variety of illustration. There is certainly no other mold of so large a capacity. The doctrine of M. Zola himself, so meager if literally taken, is fruitful, inasmuch as in practice he romantically departs from it. Mr. Stevenson does not need to depart, his individual taste being as much to pursue the romantic as his principle is to defend it. Fortunately, in England to-day, it is not much attacked. The triumphs that are to be won in the portrayal of the strange, the improbable, the heroic, especially as these things shine from afar in the credulous eye of youth, are his strongest, most constant incentive. On one happy occasion, in relating the history of "Doctor Jekyll," he has seen them as they present themselves to a maturer vision. "Doctor Jekyll" is not a "boys' book," nor yet is "Prince Otto"; the latter, however, is not, like the former, an experiment in mystification-it is, I think, more than anything else, an experiment in style, conceived one summer's day, when the auther had The novelist who leaves the extraordinary out of his account is liable to awkward confrontations, as we are compelled to reflect in this age of newspapers and of universal publicity. The next report of the next divorce case - to give an instance-shall offer us a picture of astounding combinations of circumstance and behavior, and the annals of any energetic race are rich in curious anecdote and startling example. That interesting compila tion, "Vicissitudes of Families," is but a superficial record of strange accidents; the familytaken, of course, in the long piece-is, as a gen eral thing, a catalogue of odd specimens and strong situations, and we must remember that the most singular products are those which are not exhibited. Mr. Stevenson leaves so wide a margin for the wonderful-it impinges with easy assurance upon the text that he escapes the danger of being brought up by cases he has not allowed for. When he allows for Mr. Hyde he allows for everything; and one feels, moreover, that even if he did not wave so gallantly the flag of the imaginary and contend that the improbable is what has most character, he would still insist that we ought to make believe. He would say we ought to make believe that the extraordinary is the best part of life, even if it were not, and to do so because the finest feelings-suspense, daring, cision, passion, curiosity, gallantry, eloence, friendship—are involved in it, and is of infinite importance that the tradition these precious things should not perish. He ould prefer, in a word, any day in the week, lexandre Dumas to Honoré de Balzac; and is, indeed, my impression that he prefers the thor of "The Three Musketeers" to any velist except Mr. George Meredith. I should so far as to suspect that his ideal of the deghtful work of fiction would be the adventes of Monte Cristo related by the author "Richard Feverel." There is some maginimity in his esteem for Alexandre Dumas, asmuch as in "Kidnapped" he has put into fable worthy of that inventor a fineness of ain with which Dumas never had anything do. He makes us say, Let the tradition live, y all means, since it was delightful; but at e same time he is the cause of our perceiving resh that a tradition is kept alive only by >mething being added to it. În this particular ase-in"DoctorJekyll" and "Kidnapped" Ir. Stevenson has added psychology. we But Mr. Stevenson's most brilliant stroke of that kind is the opening episode of "Treasure Island"—the arrival of the brown old seaman, with the saber-cut, at the "Admiral Benbow,' and the advent, not long after, of the blind sailor, with a green shade over his eyes, who comes tapping down the road, in quest of him, with his stick. "Treasure Island" is a "boy's book," in the sense that it embodies a boy's vision of the extraordinary; but it is unique in this, and calculated to fascinate the weary mind of experience, that what we see in it is not only the ideal fable, but, as part and parcel of that, as it were, the young reader himself and his state of mind: seem to read it over his shoulder, with an arm around his neck. It is all as perfect as a wellplayed boy's game, and nothing can exceed the spirit and skill, the humor and the openair feeling, with which the whole thing is kept at the critical pitch. It is not only a record of queer chances, but a study of young feelings; there is a moral side in it, and the figures are not puppets with vague faces. If Jim Hawkins illustrates successful daring, he does so with a delightful, rosy good-boyishness, and a conscious, modest liability to error. His luck is tremendous, but it does n't make him proud; and his manner is refreshingly provincial and human. So is that, even more, of the admirable John Silver, one of the most picturesque, and, indeed, in every way, most genially presented, villains in the whole literature of romance. He has a singularly distinct and expressive countenance, which, of course, turns out to be a grimacing mask. Never was a mask more knowingly, vividly painted. "Treasure Island" will surely become must already have become, and will remain in its way a classic; thanks to this indescribable mixture of the prodigious and the human, of surprising coincidences and familiar feelings. The language in which Mr. Stevenson has chosen to tell his story is an admirable vehicle for these feelings; with its humorous braveries and quaintnesses,its echoes of old ballads and yarns, it touches all kinds of sympathetic chords. "The New Arabian Nights" offers us, as he title indicates, the wonderful in the frankst, most delectable form. Partly extravagant, nd partly very specious, they are the result f a very happy idea, that of placing a series f adventures which are pure adventures in he setting of contemporary English life, and elating them in the placidly ingenious tone of Scheherezade. This device is carried to perfection in "The Dynamiter," where the aanner takes on more of a kind of high-flown erenity in proportion as the incidents are nore" "steep." In this line "The Suicide Club" is Mr. Stevenson's greatest success; nd the first two pages of it, not to mention others, live in the memory. For reasons which am conscious of not being able to represent as sufficient, I find something inefaceably impressive-something really hauntng-in the incident of Prince Florizel and Colonel Geraldine, who, one evening in March, are "driven by a sharp fall of sleet into an Oyster Bar in the immediate neighborhood of Leicester Square," and there have occasion to observe the entrance of a young man followed by a couple of commissionaires, each of whom carries a large dish of creamcover - a young man who "pressed these confections on every one's acceptance with exaggerated courtesy." There is no effort at a picture here, but the imagination makes one of the lighted interior, the London sleet outside, the company that we guess, given the locality, and the strange politeness of the young man, leading on to circumstances stranger still. This is what may be called putting one in the mood for a story. tarts under a VOL. XXXV.- 119. .it Is "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" a work of high philosophic intention, or simply the most ingenious and irresponsible of fictions? It has the stamp of a really imaginative production, that we may take it in different ways, but Í suppose it would be called the most serious of the author's tales. It deals with the relation of the baser parts of man to his noblerof the capacity for evil that exists in the most generous natures, and it expresses these things in a fable which is a wonderfully happy invention. The subject is endlessly interesting, and rich in all sorts of provocation, and Mr. Stevenson is to be congratulated on having touched the core of it. I may do him injustice, but it is, however, here, not the profundity of the idea which strikes me so much as the art of the presentation-the extremely successful form. There is a genuine feeling for the perpetual moral question, a fresh sense of the difficulty of being good and the brutishness of being bad, but what there is above all is a singular ability in holding the interest. I confess that that, to my sense, is the most edifying thing in the short, rapid, concentrated story, which is really a masterpiece of concision. There is something almost impertinent in the way, as I have noticed, in which Mr. Stevenson achieves his best effects without the aid of the ladies, and "Dr. Jekyll" is a capital example of his heartless independence. It is usually supposed that a truly poignant impression cannot be made without them, but in the drama of Mr. Hyde's fatal ascendency they remain altogether in the wing. It is very obvious-I do not say it cynically-that they must have played an important part in his development. The gruesome tone of the tale is, no doubt, deepened by their absence; it is like the late afternoon light of a foggy winter Sunday, when even inanimate objects have a kind of wicked look. I remember few situations in the pages of mystifying fiction more to the purpose than the episode of Mr. Utterson's going to Dr. Jekyll's to confer with the butler, when the doctor is locked up in his laboratory and the old servant, whose sagacity has hitherto encountered successfully the problems of the sideboard and the pantry, confesses that this time he is utterly baffled. The way the two men, at the door of the laboratory, discuss the identity of the mysterious personage inside, who has revealed himself in two or three inhuman glimpses to Poole, has those touches of which irresistible shudders are made. The butler's theory is that his master has been murdered, and that the murderer is in the room, personating him with a sort of clumsy diabolism. "Well, when that masked thing like a monkey jumped from among the chemicals and whipped into the cabinet, it went down my spine like ice." That is the effect upon the reader of most of the story. I say of most rather than all, because the ice rather melts in the sequel, and I have some difficulty in accepting the business of the powders, which seems to me too explicit and explanatory. The powders constitute the machinery of the transformation, and it will probably have struck many readers that this uncanny process would be more conceivable (so far as one may speak of the conceivable in such a case), if the author had not made it so definite. I have left Mr. Stevenson's best book to the last, as it is also the last he has given, at the present speaking,* to the public—the tales comprising "The Merry Men" having already appeared; but I find that, on the way, I have anticipated some of the remarks that I had intended to make about it. That which is most to the point is that there are parts of it so fine as to suggest that the author's talent has taken a fresh start, various as have been the impulses in which it had already indulged, and serious the impediments among which it is condemned to exert itself. There would have been a kind of perverse humility in his keeping up the fiction that a production so literary as "Kidnapped" is addressed to immature minds; and though it was originally given to the world, I believe, in a "boy's paper," the story embraces every occasion that it meets to satisfy the higher criticism. It has two weak spots, which need simply to be mentioned. The cruel and miserly uncle, in the first chapters, is rather in the tone of superseded tradition, and the tricks he plays upon his ingenuous nephew are a little like those of country conjurers; in these pages we feel that Mr. Stevenson is thinking too much of what a "boy's paper" is expected to contain. Then the history stops without ending, as it were; but I think I may add that this accident speaks for itself. Mr. Stevenson has often to lay down his pen for reasons that have nothing to do with the failure of inspiration, and the last page of David Balfour's adventures is an honorable plea for indulgence. The remaining five-sixths of the book deserve stand by Henry Esmond," as a fictive autobiography in archaic form. The author's sense of the English idiom of the last century, and still more of the Scotch, have enabled him to give a gallant companion to Thackeray's tour de force. The life, the humor, the color of the central portions of "Kidnapped" have a singular pictorial virtue; these passages read like a series of inspired foot-notes on some historic page. The charm of the most romantic episode in the world though perhaps it would be hard to say why it is the most romantic, when it was intermingled with so much stupidity-is over the whole business, and the forlor hope of the Stuarts is revived for us without evoking satiety. There could be no better instance of the author's talent for seeing the actual in the marvelous, and reducing the extravagant to plausible detail, than the descrip tion of Alan Breck's defense in the cabin of the ship, and the really magnificent chapters of "The Flight in the Heather." Mr. Stevenson has, in a high degree (and doubtless for Since the above was written, "Underwoods," as well as "Memories and Portraits," has been published. Food reasons of his own), what may be called he imagination of physical states, and this has nabled him to arrive at a wonderfully exact otation of the miseries of his panting Lownd hero, dragged for days and nights over fill and dale, through bog and thicket, withut meat or drink or rest, at the tail of an lomeric Highlander. The great superiority if the book resides, to my mind, however, in zae fact that it puts two characters on their met in an admirably upright way. I have paid y tribute to Alan Breck, and I can only reeat that he is a masterpiece. It is interesting observe that, though the man is extravagant, e author's touch exaggerates nothing; it is, roughout, of the most truthful, genial, ironal kind, full of penetration, but with none of le grossness of moralizing satire. The figure a genuine study, and nothing can be more harming than the way Mr. Stevenson both ees through it and admires it. Shall I say at he sees through David Balfour? This ould be, perhaps, to underestimate the denity of that medium. Beautiful, at any rate, is The expression which this unfortunate though ircumspect youth gives to those qualities thich combine to excite our respect and our objurgations in the Scottish character. Such a scene as the episode of the quarrel of the two men on the mountain-side is a real stroke of genius, and has the very logic and rhythm of life-a quarrel which we feel to be inevitable, though it is about nothing, or almost nothing, and which springs from exasperated nerves and the simple shock of temperaments. The author's vision of it has a profundity which goes deeper, I think, than " Dr. Jekyll." I know of few better examples of the way genius has ever a surprise in its pocket - keeps an ace, as it were, up its sleeve. And in this case it endears itself to us by making us reflect that such a passage as the one I speak of is in fact a signal proof of what the novel can do at its best and what nothing else can do so well. In the presence of this sort of success we perceive its immense value. It is capable of a rare transparency it can illustrate human affairs in cases so delicate and complicated that any other vehicle would be clumsy. To those who love the art that Mr. Stevenson practices he will appear, in pointing this incidental moral, not only to have won a particular triumph, but to have given a delightful pledge. Henry James. SURPRISES. EARTH, that had so long in darkness lain, "Let there be light!."- on thy first eventide What woe, what fear, wrung thy dumb soul with pain! In darkling space down dropt the red sun, slain, With all his banners drooping. Far and wide Spread desolation's vast and blackening tide. But the long hours wore on, till lo! pale gleams Broadening and reddening till the sun's full beams Darkness and brooding anguish were but dreams, Even so, O Life, all tremulous with woe, Thou too didst cower when, without sound or jar, Thy sun went out of heaven! How couldst thou know In that dark hour, that never tide could flow So ebon-black, nor ever mountain-bar Breast night so deep, without or moon or star, God never leaves thee in relentless dark. Slowly the dawn on unbelieving eyes Breaketh at last. Day brightens,- and, oh hark! A flood of birdsong from the tender skies! From storm and darkness thou hast found an ark, Julia C. R. Dorr. |