Page:Robert Louis Stevenson - a Bookman extra number 1913.djvu/175

STEVENSON'S BOOKS battered wall of the dungeon of Buchan. I saw it snatch out a dozen gaps in the converging perspective of the gas-lamps, and bring down the chimney-cans clashing on the pavement like forest leaves in a November blast. So Mr. Stevenson, who does not live there, "for love and euphony" names his collected edition (to which be all good luck and fostering breezes) "The Edinburgh Edition." I have just seen the first volume, which in its brightness and beauty seems a summary of all the perfections, and whose print recalls that in which the early novels of Scott were set up. Mr. Hole's portrait suffers a little from the excessive size of the hands, but in spite of this is by far the most characteristic and Stevensonian portrait ever done, and represents him exactly as his friends remember him at the most productive period his genius has yet known.

To me the most interesting thing in Mr. Stevenson's books is always Mr. Stevenson himself. Some authors (perhaps the greatest) severely sit with the more ancient gods, and serenely keep themselves out of their books. Most of these authors are dead now. Others put their personalities in, indeed; but would do much better to keep them out. Their futilities and pomposities, pose as they may, are no more interesting than those of the chairman of a prosperous limited company. But there are a chosen few who cannot light a cigarette or part their hair in a new place without being interesting. Upon such, in this life, interviewers bear down in shoals with pencils pointed like spears; and about them as soon as they are dead—lo! begins at once the "chatter about Harriet."

Mr. Stevenson is of this company. Rarest of all, his friends have loved and praised him so judiciously that he has no enemies. He might have been the spoiled child of letters. He is only "all the world's Louis." The one unforgiveable thing in a chequered past is that at one time he wore a black shirt, to which we refuse to be reconciled on any terms.

But when he writes of himself, how supremely excellent is the reading. It is good even when he does it intentionally, as in "Memories and Portraits." It is better still when he sings it, as in his "Child's Garden." He is irresistible to every lonely child who reads and thrills, and reads again to find his past recovered for him with effortless ease. It is a book never long out of my hands, for only in it and in my dreams when I am touched with fever, do I grasp the long,

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