ART. IX.-1. The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to his Family and Friends. Selected and Edited with Notes and Introductions by Sidney Colvin. Two vols. London: Methuen, 1899.

2. The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson. Edinburgh edition. Twenty-eight vols. 1894-98.

WE

HAT is a biography? Is it a record of the external events producing and produced by a man's life and character-the things which affected him and the things by which and in which he affected others? or is it the picture of a personality, the history of an inward experience? Both perhaps, yet more essentially the latter. When the life to be written is

that of a man of action '-when the actions of his life have been large and conspicuous, actions in which the individual is only one of many forces at work, perhaps the directing force, yet acting, as a soldier or a statesman must, in concert with many others the business of the biographer, as distinct from the historian, is to depict not the events but the man's share in the events, not the results but the motives; to show how the events were modified by the temperament under study, and how that temperament took a reflected colour from the events. Sir William Napier's 'Life' of his brother Sir Charles, one of the few masterpieces in this kind, is full indeed of battle-pictures and the story of political intrigues, but it never loses sight of its central purpose, and the events related are related to illustrate a character. To this end Napier the historian, turning biographer, relies chiefly upon the one sufficient source—the letters of the man whom he describes; and his success is mainly due to the fact that in this instance the man of action was also, potentially at least, a man of letters, possessing the literary gift of expression and the literary habit of self-scrutiny. Without that, there is no revelation. The men of past times whom we know best are not those about whom we know most; Horace is a real person to us, Augustus a great name. In other words, all biography that is vital and significant must be based on autobiography: the biographer can only work up to a central impression, where the man has written himself clear, as Scott did in his 'Journal.' Twice, indeed, in the history of literature biographical portraits have been created, in one case of a man who left no written expression of himself, in the other of a man whose writings did not adequately express him; but Plato and Boswell, though they did not rely upon first-hand writings, yet possessed a minute contemporary record in which the spoken words of two great talkers were from day to day jotted down.

So at least, arguing from the known fact about Boswell, we may perhaps infer as to Plato's method. But in the case of a personage like Horace or Montaigne, whose literary work is boldly autobiographical, biography becomes superfluous. We are grateful to Suetonius for a few details to supplement our knowledge, but we should have known Horace as well without them, although we have not Horace's private correspondence.

These considerations incline us to be extremely sorry for Mr. Graham Balfour. Stevenson in 1888 wrote and sealed a paper to be opened after his death; it contained a request that Mr. Sidney Colvin, his friend and counsellor of twenty years' standing, should prepare for publication a selection of his letters and a sketch of his life.' That wish has now up to a certain point been fulfilled; the selected letters are published in two large volumes uniform with the Edinburgh edition of the Works'; they are divided into periods, and before each period a brief outline of Stevenson's movements and actions in those years is given, with just as much comment as is needed to prevent any possible misunderstandings; each letter is headed with a note (where one is needed) to identify the personages mentioned or to explain allusions; and the whole is prefaced by an essay on the author's character, terse, subtle, and vivid, and full of the flavour that comes of long and intimate personal knowledge. In short all that an editor could do has been done. But unhappily Mr. Colvin has found himself unable to complete the separate introductory volume of narrative and critical memoir,' which he had originally designed; and so, by the wish of the family, Stevenson's cousin, Mr. Graham Balfour, has undertaken to write a formal 'Life.' Now Mr. Colvin is a master of critical biography; his brief but highly wrought 'Introduction' shows his ability to give a clear and harmonious portraiture of his friend's mind, presence, and bearing, as they appeared to those who lived with him; and he was that friend's counsellor in many difficult passages of a changeful life. Mr. Balfour also was a friend, and a trusted friend, but in literature he is an amateur; and, whatever his skill may be, he can add little or nothing to the monument which Mr. Colvin with loving diligence has built up. The plain truth is that with Stevenson's works and the Letters' before us, any one can acquire to all intents and purposes a full knowledge of the man and his life. We propose here to give such a summary biographical sketch as may in some measure justify this assertion, allowing the literary criticism of Stevenson's worksalready dealt with in a previous number of this Review-to fall for the time being into the background.

Of Stevenson's parentage it is needless to speak; everybody knows that his father and grandfather were members of a famous firm of engineers, the builders of many lighthouses. His mother's father, the Rev. Lewis Balfour, was minister of a Scottish parish. James Balfour, his great-grandfather on the same side, was a professor of moral philosophy and a well-known controversialist From this ancestor, it is suggested, he inherited that 'something of the shorter catechist' which is the last ingredient named in Mr. Henley's well-known sonnet ; however he came by it, ethical controversy was in his blood and bone. He was a delicate child, an imaginative child, an unusual child; all of this may be inferred from the Child's Garden of Verses'; it is directly stated, with many details of the child's clothing, in a recent memoir; but upon the whole the verses are more precise and more illuminating than Miss Black's reminiscences. Most important of all, he was an only child; the whole life of his parents was centred upon him. Even if they could have spared him from their sight, his delicacy forbade a boarding-school; and so he lived to an unusual degree in the very heart of his home. He was by nature prone to love, and he returned his parents' affection; and, it would seem, more fully even to his father than to his mother. 'My father, who was ever my dearest,' he writes in one of his latest letters, looking back from his lovely place of exile. Yet between these people, so closely bound together by love and by circumstance, Nature had set one of those barriers hardly passable even by love. The parents were deeply religious, and their religion was the religion of Calvin. The son, too, was truly their son, as resolute and unshakable in his faith as they in theirs; but unhappily the faiths which he held were irreconcilable with theirs. As Mr. Colvin says, 'An instinctive and inbred unwillingness to accept the accepted and conform to the conventional was of the essence of his character, whether in life or art, and was a to him both of strength and weakness.' The beliefs of his parents were not merely impossible to him, they were hateful; long years after he likened his own youth to that of Ferguson, with whom, by a strange fancy, he claimed a spiritual kinship.

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We are three Robins,' he wrote long after, who have touched the Scots lyre this last century. Well, the one is the world's, he did it, he came off, he is for ever; but I and the other-ah! what bonds we have-born in the same city; both sickly; both pestered, one nearly to madness, one to the madhouse, with a damnatory creed.'

His own faiths were strong enough, and at least not erring on the side of laxity: one may infer something of them from a letter to Mr. Archer, in which he calls himself 'a back-slidden communist'; and more still from the remarkable paper, 'Lay Morals,' drafted in 1879 (his thirtieth year), but only posthumously published. Here is a passage which illustrates the whole :

Take a few of Christ's sayings and compare them with our current doctrines. Ye cannot, he says, serve God and Mammon. Cannot? and our whole system is to teach how we can!

'The children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light. Are they? I have been led to understand the reverse that the Christian merchant, for example, prospered exceedingly in his affairs; that honesty was the best policy; that an author of repute had written a conclusive treatise, "How to Make the Best of Both Worlds." Of both worlds, indeed? Which am I to believe, then-Christ or the author of repute?

'Take no thought for the morrow. Ask the Successful Merchant; interrogate your own heart. . . . All we believe, all we hope, 'all we honour in ourselves or our contemporaries stands condemned in this one sentence; or, if you take the other view, condemns this sentence as unwise and inhumane. We are not, then, of " the same mind that was in Christ." We disagree with Christ. Either Christ meant nothing, or else he or we must be in the wrong.'

These were the opinions which Stevenson formed in his youth; and it would be truer to say that he conformed in practice to the world than that he modified his philosophy with advancing years. Yet, knowing as he knew that the parents who watched his health so anxiously would far sooner know him dead than spiritually lost-as he must seem in their eyeshe lacked the cruel courage openly to disavow their faith. But the root of dissension was there; he could not steer by their compass, he might not steer by his own; and morally he was adrift like a derelict. In other ways, however, he was steadfast to the chosen purpose of his life; through all his truantries both of school and college he was at work to make himself an artist in language. Mr. Stevenson naturally desired that his son should be apprenticed to the business which was the pride and the support of the family, and the son was not unwilling to be interested in it. Yet the letters to his mother, written at the age of eighteen-the first printed by Mr. Colvin-show rather a student of the picturesque than one concerned with engineering technicalities. As he became more and more engrossed in his own study he neglected more and more his appointed duty, and after three years his lack of inclination became apparent.

Mr. Stevenson was disappointed; he would not hear of literature, which was not in his eyes a profession; but he consented that his son should return to Edinburgh and read for the Scottish bar. Accordingly, from 1871 to 1875, Stevenson attended law classes in the University till he was called in the latter year. Regular society had no attraction for him, and he had none for it; details of his dress, which at this period was more than usually unconventional, and of his behaviour, which shocked the formalities of Edinburgh, may be found in another memoir by another acquaintance, Miss Margaret Armour. Irregular society pleased him and tempted him; like de Musset, he strayed in various forbidden paths. But the resemblance between the two men only extends to the quality of their imagination. There was in Stevenson that strong fibre for the lack of which de Musset went hopelessly to wreck; yet Stevenson's life at this time was irregular and undisciplined enough to bring sorrow to his parents. How much they knew does not appear; but the worst, in their eyes, was to come. Many a spendthrift and heartless ne'er-do-weel goes irreclaimable through life, and yet never hurts those who love him so deeply as this brilliant loving creature was forced by the very law of his being to wound those whom he loved. A letter written to one of his earliest and latest friends, Mr. Baxter-in after years his man of business-tells the story :

'Edinburgh, Feb. 2, 1873.

'The thunderbolt has fallen with a vengeance now. On Friday night after leaving you, in the course of conversation, my father put me one or two questions as to beliefs, which I candidly answered. I really hate all lying so much now-a new-found honesty that has somehow come out of my late illness-that I could not so much as hesitate at the time; but if I had foreseen the real hell of everything since, I think I should have lied, as I have done so often before. I so far thought of my father, but I had forgotten my mother. And now! they are both ill, both silent, both as down in the mouth as if— I can find no simile. You may fancy how happy it is for me. If it were not too late, I think I could almost find it in my heart to retract, but it is too late. And again, am I to live my whole life as one falsehood? Of course, it is rougher than hell upon my father, but can I help it? They don't see either that my game is not the lighthearted scoffer; that I am not (as they call me) a careless infidel. I believe as much as they do, only generally in the inverse ratio; I am, I think, as honest as they can be in what I hold. I have not come hastily to my views. I reserve (as I told them) many points until I acquire fuller information, and do not think I am thus justly to be called "horrible atheist."

'Now what is to take place? What a curse I am to my parents! O Lord, what a pleasant thing it is to have just damned the happiness