of an elastic and harmonious English prose, in which trite and inanimate elements should have no place, and which should be supple to all uses and alive in all its joints and members, was an aim which he pursued with ungrudging, even with heroic, toil. Not always, especially not at the beginning, but in by far the greater part of his mature work, the effect of labour and fastidious selection is lost in the felicity of the result. Energy of vision goes hand in hand with magic of presentment, and both words and things acquire new meaning and a new vitality under his touch. Next to finish and brilliancy of execution, the most remarkable quality of his work is its variety. Without being the inventor of any new form or mode of literary art (unless, indeed, the verses of the ‘Child's Garden’ are to be accounted such), he handled with success and freshness nearly all the old forms—the moral, critical, and personal essay, travels sentimental and other, romances and short tales both historical and modern, parables and tales of mystery, boys' stories of adventure, drama, memoir, lyrical and meditative verse both English and Scottish. To some of these forms he gave quite new life: through all alike he expressed vividly his own extremely personal way of seeing and being, his peculiar sense of nature and of romance.
In personal appearance Stevenson was of good stature (about 5 ft. 10 in.) and activity, but very slender, his leanness of body and limb (not of face) having been throughout life abnormal. The head was small; the eyes dark hazel, very wide-set, intent, and beaming; the face of a long oval shape; the expression rich and animated. He had a free and picturesque play of gesture and a voice of full and manly fibre, in which his pulmonary weakness was not at all betrayed. The features are familiar from many photographs and cuts. Of two small full-length portraits by Mr. John S. Sargent one belongs to the family, the other to Mr. Fairchild of Newport, U.S.A.; an oil sketch, done in one sitting, by Sir W. B. Richmond, in the National Portrait Gallery; a drawing from life, by an American artist, Mr. Alexander; a large medallion portrait in bronze, in some respects excellent, by A. St. Gaudens of New York; and a portrait painted in 1893 at Samoa by Signor Nerli, in private possession in Scotland.
His published writings, in book and pamphlet form, are as follows: 1. ‘The Pentland Rising, a Page of History, 1666’ (pamphlet), 1866. 2. ‘An Appeal to the Church of Scotland’ (pamphlet), 1875. 3. ‘An Inland Voyage,’ 1878. 4. ‘Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh,’ 1879. 5. ‘Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes,’ 1879. 6. ‘Virginibus Puerisque,’ 1881. 7. ‘Familiar Studies of Men and Books,’ 1882. 8. ‘Treasure Island,’ 1882. 9. ‘New Arabian Nights,’ 1882. 10. ‘The Silverado Squatters,’ 1883. 11. ‘Prince Otto,’ 1885. 12. ‘The Child's Garden of Verses,’ 1885. 13. ‘More New Arabian Nights: the Dynamiter,’ 1885. 14. ‘The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,’ 1886. 15. ‘Kidnapped,’ 1886. 16. ‘The Merry Men and other Tales,’ 1886. 17. ‘Underwoods,’ 1887. 18. ‘Memories and Portraits,’ 1887. 19. ‘Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin’ (prefixed to ‘Papers of Fleeming Jenkin,’ 2 vols.), 1887. 20. ‘The Black Arrow,’ 1888. 21. ‘The Wrong Box’ (in collaboration with Mr. Lloyd Osbourne), 1888. 22. ‘The Master of Ballantrae,’ 1889. 23. ‘Ballads,’ 1890. 24. ‘Father Damien: an Open Letter’ (pamphlet) 1890. 25. ‘The Wrecker’ (in collaboration with Mr. Lloyd Osbourne), 1892. 26. ‘Across the Plains,’ 1892. 27. ‘A Footnote to History,’ 1893. 28. ‘Island Nights' Entertainments,’ 1893. 29. ‘Catriona’ (being the sequel to ‘Kidnapped’), 1893. 30. ‘The Ebb-Tide’ (in collaboration with Mr. Lloyd Osbourne), 1894. The above were published during his lifetime; subsequently there appeared: 31. ‘Vailima Letters,’ 1895. 32. ‘Fables’ (appended to a new edition of ‘Jekyll and Hyde’), 1896. 33. ‘Weir of Hermiston,’ 1896. 34. ‘Songs of Travel,’ 1896. 35. ‘St. Ives,’ with the final chapters supplied by Mr. A. T. Quiller Couch, 1897. 36. ‘Letters to his Family and Friends,’ ed. Sidney Colvin, 1899. All save the last were reprinted in the limited ‘Edinburgh Edition,’ which also contains the ‘Amateur Emigrant,’ entire for the first time (the title-paper of No. 26, ‘Across the Plains,’ was the second part of this); the unfinished ‘Family of Engineers,’ which has not been printed elsewhere; the ‘Story of a Lie,’ the ‘Misadventures of John Nicholson;’ and the fragmentary romance, ‘The Great North Road’—all here reprinted from periodicals for the first time; the ‘South Sea Letters,’ not elsewhere reprinted; as well as ‘The Pentland Rising,’ ‘A Letter to the Church of Scotland,’ the ‘Edinburgh University Magazine Essays,’ ‘Lay Morals,’ ‘Prayers written for Family Use at Vailima,’ and a number of other papers and fragments, early and late, which have not been collected elsewhere. The edition is in twenty-seven volumes, of which the first series of twenty appeared 15 Nov. 1894–15 June 1896, and the supplementary series of seven December 1896–February 1898.
Memories And Portraits
NOTE
This volume of papers, unconnected as they are, it will be better to read through from the beginning, rather than dip into at random. A certain thread of meaning binds them. Memories of childhood and youth, portraits of those who have gone before us in the battle—taken together, they build up a face that “I have loved long since and lost awhile,” the face of what was once myself. This has come by accident; I had no design at first to be autobiographical; I was but led away by the charm of beloved memories and by regret for the irrevocable dead; and when my own young face (which is a face of the dead also) began to appear in the well as by a kind of magic, I was the first to be surprised at the occurrence.
My grandfather the pious child, my father the idle eager sentimental youth, I have thus unconsciously exposed. Of their descendant, the person of to-day, I wish to keep the secret: not because I love him better, but because, with him, I am still in a business partnership, and cannot divide interests.
Of the papers which make up the volume, some have appeared already in The Cornhill, Longman’s, Scribner, The English Illustrated, The Magazine of Art, The Contemporary Review; three are here in print for the first time; and two others have enjoyed only what may he regarded as a private circulation.
R. L S.
CHAPTER I. THE FOREIGNER AT HOME
“This is no my ain house;
I ken by the biggin’ o’t.”
Two recent books [1] one by Mr. Grant White on England, one on France by the diabolically clever Mr. Hillebrand, may well have set people thinking on the divisions of races and nations. Such thoughts should arise with particular congruity and force to inhabitants of that United Kingdom, peopled from so many different stocks, babbling so many different dialects, and offering in its extent such singular contrasts, from the busiest over-population to the unkindliest desert, from the Black Country to the Moor of Rannoch. It is not only when we cross the seas that we go abroad; there are foreign parts of England; and the race that has conquered so wide an empire has not yet managed to assimilate the islands whence she sprang. Ireland, Wales, and the Scottish mountains still cling, in part, to their old Gaelic speech. It was but the other day that English triumphed in Cornwall, and they still show in Mousehole, on St. Michael’s Bay, the house of the last Cornish-speaking woman. English itself, which will now frank the traveller through the most of North America, through the greater South Sea Islands, in India, along much of the coast of Africa, and in the ports of China and Japan, is still to be heard, in its home country, in half a hundred varying stages of transition. You may go all over the States, and—setting aside the actual intrusion and influence of foreigners, negro, French, or Chinese—you shall scarce meet with so marked a difference of accent as in the forty miles between Edinburgh and Glasgow, or of dialect as in the hundred miles between Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Book English has gone round the world, but
