offering of life without my art. I am not but in my art; it is me; I am the body of it merely.

And yet I produce nothing, am the author of "Brashiana" and other works; tiddy-iddity-as if the works one wrote were anything but 'prentice's experiments. Dear reader, I deceive you with husks; the real works and all the pleasure are still mine and incommunicable. After this break in my work, beginning to return to it, as from light sleep, I wax exclamatory, as you see—

'Ay, but you

made no art! some!'

'Sursum Corda:

Heave ahead:
Here's luck.

Art and Blue Heaven,

April and God's Larks.

Green reeds and the sky-scattering river.

A stately music.

Enter God!

-R. L. S.

know, until a man can write that "Enter God," he has None! Come, let us take counsel together and make

Happy-I was only happy once; that was at Hyères '-he writes in the Vailima Letters'; and so one must extract a good deal from the correspondence of this period to give an idea of the gaiety which balanced, and over-balanced, in his disposition the under-tone of melancholy. Yet often the two blend in a strange saturnine humour, which is perhaps more fully characteristic of the man than any other of his many facets. 1883 was overshadowed towards its close with gloom: the death of his friend Walter Ferrier made the first gap in the circle of his intimates, and he felt it keenly. Moreover, his father was drifting into a lethargic melancholy, from which the son laboured to rouse him with exhortations half playful, wholly earnest. Resignation' (or the False Gratitude plant') is a thing to be weeded out. In its place put Laughter and a Good Conceit (that capital home evergreen) and a bush of Flowering Piety-but see it be the flowering sort—the other species is no ornament to any gentleman's back garden.' Although this same letter begins with an expression of the writer's own gratitude for the closing year, which has made him solvent and cheerful, in the first month of 1884 another bad attack occurred, and left this courageous planter of herbs (who signed himself 'Jno. Bunyan') in a state which might well produce 'gran' plants' of Resignation. Yet Laughter still flourished in his garden, and in March he was writing to Mr. Cosmo Monkhouse, then at Dover, a place which awakened envious thoughts of the people who could be happy under a sky so cheerless :—

It is idle to deny it: I havo-I may say I nourish—a growing jealousy of the robust, large-legged, healthy Britain-dwellers, patient of grog, scorners of the timid umbrella, innocuously breathing fog: all which I once was, and I am ashamed to say liked it. How ignorant is youth! grossly rolling among unselected pleasures; and how nobler, purer, sweeter, and lighter, to sip the choice tonic, to recline in the luxurious invalid chair, and to tread, well-shawled, the little round of the constitutional. Seriously, do you like to repose? Ye gods, I hate it. I never rest with any acceptation; I do not know what people mean who say they like sleep and that damned bedtime, which, since long ere I was breeched, has rung a knell to all my day's doings and beings. And when a man, seemingly sane, tells me he has "fallen in love with stagnation," I can only say to him, " You will never be a Pirate!" This may not cause any regret to Mrs. Monkhouse, but in your own soul it will clang hollow-think of it! Never! After all boyhood's aspirations and youth's immoral day-dreams, you are condemned to sit down, grossly draw in your chair to the fat board, and be a beastly Burgess till you die.'

Gladly would one quote the still funnier letter of April, signed R. L. Monkhouse,' in which Stevenson proposes a change of personality with his friend, and describes the furniture of his own bodily habitation: but there must be a limit. Yet no spirits can stand out for ever, and in a few months he is writing to Mr. Colvin, 'very dim, dumb, dowie, and damnable,' reduced to talk by signs. My life dwindles into a kind of Valley of the Shadow picnic,' he says, and a better word could not be invented to describe what it was for the next four years. Returning to England he settled at Bournemouth, and there, till he left his country for ever in 1887, he lived a denizen of the land of counterpane.' But, though his 'vile body' might lay him low, and deny him even the exercise of speech, it could not break his spirit or impair his mental energy. In the 'land of counterpane' he finished 'Prince Otto,' which had not the success that was once hoped for it; but Kidnapped,' the story which sprang out of his projected history of the Highlands, achieved a popularity wider even than that of Treasure Island'; while 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,' published in 1886, finally established his fame. He had gained a position which assured to him not only reputation but an income which he, at least for the moment, counted riches.

And yet such is the nature of man-he was further than ever from contentment. While the pursuit of success occupied all his faculties, he did not speculate on its worth, if attained. But when he found himself in the full possession of fame, with thousands ready to pay for his utterances, he began immediately

to question with himself whether his aim had after all been a worthy one. He was a bread winner-that, at least, was accomplished, and justified his existence; but was he doing a man's work in the world when he 'elected to live by a pleasure'? that is, by doing what gave him pleasure to do, and what gave to others none of life's necessities, but a luxury. His extreme statement of this point of view may be found in the 'Letter to a Young Gentleman about to embrace the Career of Art,' where, by a curiously misleading analogy, the artist is placed on a level with a fille de joie, since each lives by selling a pleasure. It is needless to refute the fallacy; indeed Stevenson admits it in a letter from Samoa to Mr. Le Gallienne; and one finds him adding-though with some hesitation-the artist's life to the three professions which appeared to him best to befit man's dignity. His model men were oddly chosen—the sailor, the shepherd, the schoolmaster; and the artist was only admitted to the same category as a kind of adjunct to the teacher. That is a very notable avowal from one who preached so resolutely that art should be 'a-moral'; and it would be easy to demonstrate that no artist has given better aid to the instructor of youth's morals than Stevenson himself. But these matters belong rather to criticism than to biography, and our object is to show that out of these letters the story of the man's life may be constructed. A student of the life, then, will note in these years-1885-87— a change of preoccupation. The goal of Stevenson's youth was achieved, and ambition, perennially concerned with the unaccomplished, sought new paths to explore. There set in what he himself calls, in a new and illuminating phrase, 'the green-sickness of maturity.' This surprising invalid was troubled with a ferment of new energies; he desired to make himself felt in the world more directly than by literature; in short, he wanted to do something, just as every boy wants to be something-something notable that should justify his existence in his own eyes.

The Gordon episode and the desertion of the Egyptian outposts in the Sudan had grievously distressed him; it seemed to this chivalrous nature that England was drifting out of all touch with the plain code of honour, and his resentment was so fierce that he abandoned a project which involved a personal letter to Mr. Gladstone. How should I sign it,' he asks, 'unless "Your fellow criminal in the sight of God"?' In the beginning of 1886 chance offered to him what he conceived to be a public duty. A man named Curtin had been murdered in the south of Ireland his widow and children were boycotted, and could neither let the farm nor get help to work it. Stevenson

proposed to take it up; and a letter to Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin (widow of the friend on whose memoir he was then at work) reveals the man perhaps more fully than any other in the book. Unfortunately it is much too long to quote. It sets out the considerations for and against the project with the most curious frankness and absence of illusion, mingling in the soberest way jest and earnest, quixotism and cynicism. Cynicism is met indeed on its own ground by analysis as unsparing as La Rochefoucauld's. Is he sure he is not taking up the notion for the sake of excitement? His answer is, first, that he does not think so; secondly, that excitement is the natural and merited reward of those who face danger. But fundamentally the philosophy of the letter is the same as that indicated in 'Lay Morals': an ethical teaching based literally on the reported utterances of Christ. Fourth objection: I am married. “I have married a wife." I seem to have heard it before; it smells ancient ; what was the context?' Christ, in short, denounces that objection, as it is Christ's philosophy that dictates the conclusion.

It seems to us a thing to be regretted that in this matter Stevenson was deterred from executing his intention; a resolute man is safe almost anywhere under such conditions. The thought of his father, who was then approaching his end, and must have been tortured with anxiety, was probably the chief obstacle. That care kept Stevenson in England when the needs of his health called him abroad. When, in May 1887, the tie was severed by his father's death, he determined to fly from a climate in which he could barely exist, and in August took leave of England-little knowing that it was for the last time. His original design was a temporary settlement in the mountains of Colorado; but business detained him in New York-where offers of work at high prices showered upon him-and American doctors advised a season in the Adirondack Hills. Here he and his family lived till the following summer, and here the 'Master of Ballantrae' was conceived and in part written. Before it was completed, Stevenson, who had always loved the sea, projected a yachting cruise, and a publisher offered 2,000l. for the account of a voyage in the South Seas and so it came to pass that in June 1888 he, with his wife, his stepson, and his mother, sailed on board the schooner yacht Casco out of San Francisco for the Marquesas. In America, the introspective speculations upon life and art and man's worth in the world, of which we have spoken, had condensed themselves into the

*Vol. ii, p. 30.

serve as

moralistic papers published in 'Scribner's Magazine,' of which Pulvis et Umbra' and A Christmas Sermon 6 excellent examples. This new departure in the artist's lifeas it proved to be—was undertaken not only in quest of health, but as a means to get over 'the green-sickness of maturity (the actual phrase occurs in a letter to Mr. Henry James written before sailing); and the experiment proved wholly successful. For if Stevenson slept and woke in his art, as he wrote to Mr. Henley, if it was the very body of him, he could say with equal truth that he was a person who prefers life to art, and who knows that is a far finer thing to be in love or to risk a danger than to paint the finest picture or write the finest book.' So he writes a little later in reply to his French admirer, M. Marcel Schwob:

You say l'artiste inconscient set off to travel; you do not divide me right: 0.6 of me is artist, 0.4 adventurer. First, I suppose, come letters; then adventure; and since I have indulged the second part, I think the formula begins to change: 0.55 of an artist, 0·45 of the adventurer were nearer true. And if it had not been for my small strength, I might have been a different man in all things.'

Both the artist and the adventurer found their account in the new life. The Pacific islands had always charmed Stevenson as a dream, from the day in 1875 when Mr. Seed, Premier of New Zealand, had come to the house in Edinburgh and talked of 'beautiful places green for ever'—'absolute balm for the weary.' Now, fourteen years later, he made that first landfall at Nuka-hiva, which is described in the opening chapter of his book In the South Seas':

'The mark of anchorage was a blow-hole in the rocks, near the south-easterly corner of the bay. Punctually to our use, the blowhole spouted; the schooner turned upon her heel; the anchor plunged. It was a small sound, a great event; my soul went down with these moorings whence no windlass may extract nor any diver fish it up; and I and some part of my ship's company were from that hour the bond-slaves of the isles of Vivien.'

It is impossible here to do more than sketch the remaining five years of his life, for they were full years. They began with two seasons of perilous sailing in the 'Casco,' then one in a trading steamer, the Janet Nicoll,' after which he settled down to his home and his last resting-place in Samoa. One can only indicate here the fascination which this life had for him. First, the adventure, the danger of the schooner experiences, which may be inferred from several passages in these letters; secondly, the actual beauty of the scenes and the charm of the