Transcriber's Note:

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation in the original document have been preserved.

DANIEL WEBSTER

Engraved by Gustav Kruell; after a daguerreotype in the possession of Josiah J. Hawes, Boston.

SCRIBNER'S
MAGAZINE

PUBLISHED MONTHLY
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

VOLUME XXVI JULY-DECEMBER
1899

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS NEW YORK
SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON & Co. Limited LONDON

Copyright, 1899,
By Charles Scribner's Sons.

Printed by Trow Directory, Printing and Bookbinding Company, New York, U. S. A.

CONTENTS
OF
SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE

Volume XXVI July-December, 1899.

POETRY

Scribner's Magazine

VOL. XXVI. JULY, 1899. NO. 1.

Copyright, 1899, by Charles Scribner's Sons. All rights reserved.
Printed in New York.

JOHN LA FARGE
By Russell Sturgis

A Study.

The artist of four hundred years ago, or of any great time for individual effort as opposed to the associated and unrecorded work of more primitive times, was a many-sided man. He was probably a traveller, if not a monk; he was almost certainly a man of adventure; a man of thought, whether monk or layman. The artist did not travel far; but he encountered more personal risk between Florence and Naples than our contemporary does in voyaging to the Isles of Summer; he encountered in Sicily, in Hungary, or in Spain a people as remote from him as the Japanese are from us; and he had still Constantinople and Cairo to visit, places more distant and as inaccessible to him as Thibet or Kafiristan in the nineteenth century. The old artist was something of a scholar, too, with a habit of study and meditation, if not master of many books. And, moreover, the old artist was very much in love with his work and loved to play with it as well as to work in it; so that he touched many materials, handled many processes, and used many methods of artistic utterance. Again it is worth noting that no one had discovered, in 1499, that architecture was an art to be practised without regard to the other manifestations of the artistic spirit; nor yet that the sculptor and the painter were two workmen whose art was to be practised apart from and independent of building or other industrial occupation.

Study for Browning's "Men and Women."

All these things have been so much changed of late that it is noticeable in Mr. La Farge's life that he should be, in many ways, like a painter of old time, that is, traveller, reader, collector and student; colorist and decorator; painter in large and in little. He has been a working artist for forty years, and has done many things. He has made many book illustrations which have been published and many which have never been given to the world. The illustrations to Browning's book, "Men and Women," as it was originally published in 1855, are among these; and there are reproduced here the full-page design for the beginning of Protus and also two studies for Fra Lippo Lippi:

The little children round him in a row

Of admiration, half for his beard and half

For that white anger of his victim's son.

This was early work. The illustration to Misconceptions is as mystical as that for Protus; and that which concludes Bishop Blougram's Apology is as realistic as these studies of children.

Study for Browning's "Men and Women."

Then, still of his early days, are to be considered the faithful little studies and close-to-nature drawings which served as a foundation for a structure of knowledge which was to pile itself high enough. Sic itur ad astra; and with a different result from the tower-building recorded in Genesis. The reproduction given [[on page 9]] is from a sketch-book of 1860; and the work has been a careful drawing in black on white, done in the flat country about Bayou Têche. These are drawings in values, or made for values; that is to say, the relative force of darkness or of light is carefully preserved. A certain green of the trees may be lighter than the blue, still water below, but is very much darker than the same water where it reflects the pale evening sky; the reflection in the water of those same trees is a shade or two darker than the mass of trees themselves; and so on, forever. Of the same epoch is this drawing of a beacon [[page 10]], a flaming cresset, a signal light seen against a night sky. These are warnings to steamboats on the Mississippi to avoid a shoal or to make a landing. Other studies, those of pure line and those of masses, those of his youth and those of his maturity, are scattered over these pages.

He has produced also a very great number of water-color drawings, generally small, and very commonly having for their subjects pieces of foreground detail, such as one or several blossoms in a pool of water, or a water-lily or two afloat on the surface of a still pond. It might almost be said that his water-colors were generally of such detail as this, except that the work done during his journeys into tropical and oriental lands has resulted differently.

Again he has produced, during those years of work, a few large pictures painted in oil-color or by a process which he learned in his youth and in which melted wax has a part; though this is not the encaustic process of antiquity or of modern revival. One or two of these are portraits, several are landscapes, several are studies of interesting details which he wished to preserve and which for some reason or other had struck him as more easily rendered on a large scale and in the more solid material; and some are, to all appearance, concepts for mural decoration—advance studies for that which was to be painted on a still larger scale, or in combination with other parts of a large composition, and finally to be fixed upon the wall where it was to remain permanently. Some, also, of the water-colors produced in recent years are, though not large in superficies, very large in treatment. A glowing color composition suggested by the mountain country of Fiji, a monochrome study of a river landscape in Japan, may be as grandiose in character and may contain as much matter, both in represented detail and in artistic purpose, as an oil-painting of four times the surface-measurement. Some illustrations given on another page of this treatise may partly show the qualities here suggested.

Panel, from One of the Ceilings in Cornelius Vanderbilt's House. Inlaid glass, ivory, bronze, marble and silver, and mother-of-pearl.

Figure from the Vanderbilt Ceiling.

He has produced, also, a few such mural paintings as those whose intention is assumed in the last paragraph. Of these, much the largest is that which covers the end wall of the Church of the Ascension in New York. There are others in St. Thomas's Church and in the Church of the Incarnation, both in New York City; the interior of Trinity Church in Boston was painted by him with a series of figure subjects, though the chromatic treatment of this interior does not include any large single painting of great importance; and of late years, two lunettes in the Villard-Reid house in New York and one in the Walker Art Gallery at Bowdoin College have been added to this summary list. There is reproduced here the last-named picture [[page 17]; a picture of fantastic subject in the "literary" or narrative sense. Athens is its given name; but it represents Pallas making a drawing of the lovely and unadorned genius of the open country or wood, while the robed and crowned impersonated City looks affectionately at both the subject and the recording goddess. To be classed under the head of mural paintings also is the remarkable composition of small pictures involved in a large design with panels and arabesques, which decorates the wooden vaults of that gallery in Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt's house, which used to be called the Water-Color Room, and which now, since the alteration of the house and the removal of this painted vault into the new building, may be considered the gallery of entrance for stately entertainments. To a limited extent, the work of other painters is associated with his own in the last-named achievement, as also in Trinity Church. In this, the work of the artist comes very near to decoration pure and simple. The reader is not to understand that any sharp distinction is made here between decoration and that painting which is not so designated. It is to be hoped that he, the reader, will see as he reads that to deny this distinction is part of the life-purpose of John La Farge; a purpose which his critic is glad to recognize and to second. It is merely with reference to its placing—to its apparent intended service—to its fixed location and its consequent exclusion from the category of "gallery pictures" or "easel pictures" that the words decoration and decorative are here applied to certain paintings. For throughout his career this artist has leaned strongly toward the treatment of his expressional and significant painting in a decorative way.

Decoration in the more usual sense has been also a large part of his work. Thus, when in 1878 he contracted with Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt for a carved ceiling, it appeared that his intentions in the matter were those which could have been suggested only by a mind full of the decorative idea. "A carved ceiling" might have been almost anything; but this one was an elaborate composition of colored sculpture, or, if you please, of polychromy in relief; certainly one of the most remarkable undertakings of the time. What seem to be (for the true constructional character of the ceiling is not here guaranteed) what seem to be the beams, the constructional part of the ceiling, were of light-colored walnut. The panels within were filled with figures of armed warriors and of draped women of about half life-size, and these panels were framed by rim within rim, moulding within moulding, of elaborate sculptured pattern. All these sculptured patterns, all these figures, were invested with color in a way which it is hard to describe; for different chosen woods, alloys of metal of which some are of Japanese origin, opaque and colored glass, ivory, mother-of-pearl, and even coral are combined to give delicately tinted color and subtle variety of surface to the work. That ceiling has been broken up; but there has been great good judgment shown in its rearrangement. The panels of the ceiling are now arranged so that they are well lighted both by day and by night, and show admirably. Although the original design has disappeared, the separate panels, each with its enclosing mouldings and woodwork, at least four by six feet in superficies, are well displayed. One of these panels is here engraved [[page 6]]. Here also is given part of a decorative frieze in which castings specially made of blue glass were used with ivory and with carvings in solid nacre, in combination with the carved walnut.

Dry Bed of the Dayagawa River.

Drawn by John La Farge.

Study for Values.

Similar work has been done by Mr. La Farge in connection with his own paintings, and sometimes where no paintings were used. This use, on a large scale, of rich material, rich in color, in surface and in lustre, as a medium for sculpture, is almost peculiar to this artist among modern men. Others who have cared for color in sculpture have played with it, rather, in small objects of the cabinet; and this remains true in a general way in spite of a pleasant use of enamel in some French work in bronze of a more important or, at least, more pretentious character.

On the Bayou Têche; Study for Values.

At a time not far removed from the undertaking of the ceiling and the mantelpiece above mentioned, a monument was put up in the Newport Cemetery under the direction of Mr. La Farge [[page 16]]. He associated with himself in this task the sculptor, since so widely known, but then a young man, Augustus St. Gaudens, who had already worked with him on the carved and colored ceiling. Every student of architectural designs will be struck by the informal character of this design: the steps which are clearly not meant to be ascended and which have an obvious symbolic meaning; the horizontal cross sunk in the table of the monument in such a way that few persons can be so placed as to see it favorably; the inscription carved upon the butt or foot of that cross; the apparently disproportionate slenderness of the upright cross with its thin cylindrical shaft; the placing of other inscriptions on the body of the massive base in which no specially arranged panels or medallions have been prepared for them; and, most of all, the treatment of the leaf sculpture which, though composed carefully enough and far enough in itself from being a piece of crude realism, is yet realistic in its disposition—suggesting the natural fall of sprays and branches of leafage allowed to dry and harden in the sun. No architect—as we now understand the term—no architect, even one who had kept himself free from the neo-classic influence and the teaching of the schools, could have designed such a piece as this. It is the more interesting to see how the highly trained decorative artist who has not been fettered by the taught maxims of the architect's school or the architect's office has handled this problem—a problem rarely met by decorators of modern experience.

Study of a Mullein-stalk.

About 1876 these same demands upon him for decoration led him to the careful observation of ancient stained glass, with a view to providing the modern world with something which might be to it what the windows of Reims Cathedral and Fairford Church were to the Middle Ages. It appeared to the modern artist that there was still a course open to him which had not been tried by the decorators of the Middle Ages, early or late. It appeared that the modern materials and processes of glassmaking might give to the artist in glass a "palette" such as the mediæval man had never possessed. What is called opal glass, opaline, and also opalescent glass may be said to have formed the basis of a new system of window decoration, though the other essential, the leaden framework, was to play its own part in the artistical result. Uncolored opaline glass has a milky-white look when seen by reflected light; but by transmitted light its color passes from a cloudy bluish-gray to red, with a yellow spark. If, now, such glass be charged with color of many shades, the chromatic effects producible by the combination of such translucent materials, at once contrasting in color and harmonized by the opaline quality, might prove successful beyond what had been known. To this, then, La Farge set himself; to obtain glass of richness, depth, and glow of color hitherto unattempted, and in a multitude of tints; so that, whereas the thirteenth-century artist had five or six colors in all, susceptible of nothing more than a gradation from darker to lighter, as the glass was thicker or thinner or more or less thickly flashed—now, colors were to be supplied by the score, each color capable of these same gradations in darker and lighter, and each color harmonized with all the other colors by the common quality of softness and a certain misty iridescence caused by the opaline stain. Even in a piece of glass so brilliant in color that the opalescence is hardly perceptible, its presence in that part of the general chromatic scheme will surely be felt.

Study of a Beacon.

A window is, when considered as a work of fine art in color, a translucent composition, there being no part of it which can appeal to the eye by other than transmitted light. The artist has, then, the need of something strong to lean upon, some background, some fond upon which to relieve his more brilliant pieces of translucency; for it can be easily understood that color composition which is wholly translucent will tend toward feebleness, toward paleness, toward a certain evanescent and doubtful character of its colors, from which it must be saved. This needed background was found in the use of the leads; that is to say, of those strips of lead made generally in the form of a capital I, in which the edges of the separate pieces of glass are held. By taking these leads as the artistic sub-structure of the composition, by placing them where needed, and by cutting the glass accordingly, by combining the colors of the glass in such a way as to allow the leads to be put where they were needed for this purpose of background, results were obtained which no artist in glass had ever yet attempted. La Farge's use of leads, in this way, remains peculiarly his own in the subtlety and refinement of the linear design. Occasionally, indeed, a certain amount of opaque painting, of that solid non-translucent painting which the men of the Middle Ages used continually, has been used to increase the area of his lead sash-bars or to diminish the brilliancy of a background. All artists recognize the need of the repentir, of the amendment made after the work is partly done, or even, to all eyes but their own, completed; and painting in opaque color has been used by La Farge when it has appeared that the lead-sash was not quite sufficient for the background needed. In like manner, painting in translucent colored enamels has been used by him where it has appeared to him that no glass available would produce the tone desired. As such instances are occasional and rare, these devices are not a part of the essence of La Farge's work in glass, and they are mentioned here merely because their existence must be understood as accidental. The treatment of heads and hands and other necessarily nude parts of the body, in order that these surfaces may harmonize with the generally unpainted drapery and background, would require pages of discussion if entered upon at all.

The purpose of this article is not, however, to dwell in detail upon the historical development of his art, but to criticise it in its main features, and to institute an inquiry into those traits of La Farge's personality which have made his work especially interesting to all persons who care for the retention of noble design in that which is obviously novel, original, modern in art.

Study for a Decoration for a Page of Browning's "Men and Women," 1861.

In the first place, then, Mr. La Farge is very individual as a designer. He hardly belongs to any school of designers. The reader will suggest at once that, as there is no school of designers at the present day, a man of force is compelled to be individual; and this dictum will be readily accepted. Inasmuch as there has been no time since La Farge reached the age of intelligence and of interest in art—no time when he has not been a student of Japanese art; inasmuch as he began, as long ago as 1860, to buy and study what few pieces of Japanese art and handicraft he could find—it has been thought that he is strongly influenced by Japanese design; but this it will be hard to establish. His design is individual and personal, and it is that whether we take design to mean his way of conceiving the human figure; or his way of composing human figures in large groups with care for the effect of line and mass; or whether we think, rather, of the filling of the panel or the canvas, the parallelogram or the half-circle, with masses of color and tendencies of line.

Study for the Wolf-Charmer.

Another Study for the Wolf-Charmer.

Now, in this individuality of his art, there is a weaker as well as a stronger side. It cannot be ignored by those who admire his larger and statelier designs that they lack something of stateliness. The figures in his small woodcuts are carried out of the strict and grave system of academic drawing into an extreme of freedom of gesture and movement, and that with the evident purpose of expressing in the strongest possible way the intense meaning of the artist; but this hardly allows of mention except as a virtue. Bishop Hatto in his screaming agony, as the rats attack him on every side while he crouches at the foot of the column on the capital of which the cat has taken refuge (for each and all the details of which see Southey's poem)—Bishop Hatto is almost liquified, has almost lost the solid substance of his corporeal form, in his horror and hopelessness. Enoch Arden, "the long-haired, long-bearded solitary," hardly shows the strong man, the vigorous sailor under his rags and through his squalor; the emphasis is laid on the fourteen years' solitary confinement in this lonely island, and the "strong heroic soul" which the poet drew has not interested the artist as part of this design. These are small drawings for wood-engraving and for book illustration; but the same character of design occurs again and again in the larger and statelier pieces; and it may there be less easy to accept. The impression made upon a student of mural painting, ancient and modern, by such a painting as that in the Church of the Ascension is that it is, in a sense, lacking in repose. The Adoring Angels around the risen Saviour are individual in their gestures, in the pose of their bodies, in the expression of their faces. They are personalities rather than parts of a "Glory of Angels." The figure of Christ itself has the same peculiarity and is marked by a singularly free and unconventional pose of the body and gesture of the right arm, suggestive rather of the teacher of men than of the Son taken up to his Father. Moreover, this effect as of too much movement and incident, as of too little stability and gravity, is heightened by the flowing drapery, which is so marked a feature of the composition that it remains uppermost in the minds of many students to the very end of their study of the picture. Something of this may be seen in the illustration given here of the noble window which was sent to the Exhibition of 1889 [[page 15]]. The subject is the Sealing of the Servants of God. These groups are of indubitable truth and power as illustrations of the passage in the Apocalypse; but as parts of a solemn color design another standard needs to be applied to them.

The Floating Head.

So much for the less agreeable side of this familiar and personal way of designing. In the favorable aspect there would, of course, be very much to be said, for he is no illustrator, he is no story-teller, he is no composer of pictured fable or pictured record who does not understand how to give his figures that life and movement, that action and expression, which will explain all that is explainable of their purpose and their function. Nothing, for instance, can be more perfect as a bit of mystical story-telling than the Wolf-Charmer, the picture in which the gaunt and haggard magician, with his pipe at his lips, comes out of the forest surrounded by his drove of gigantic wolves. Two studies for the wolves are given here; and the spirit of the design is interesting to trace in them. To give the savage creatures something more than their due size, and, above all, something more than their due ferocity, is a natural and obvious device; but to express, as the artist has expressed, their familiarity with their leader, their sympathy with him, their spirit entering into his as he heads and controls them, is something admirable in descriptive art. So in that grim picture in which some part of the spirit of feudal Japan is contained; the picture which tells the tale of little Kio-Sai; the rushing and turbulent stream between its high banks is gray and sombre as if with the swollen waters of a flood; and upon it, whirled along in its course, the severed head which frightened the child floats face upward with something of its living expression still lingering about the eyes and lips, but still as dead, as corpse-like as a severed head could be. This powerful drawing, made within the last two years, is to be cited as a characteristic specimen of expressional art. There is nothing in the picture but whirling water and floating head; and yet the stern, fierce, half-savage, feudal system of Japan, which coexisted with an almost too subtle refinement of manners and of thought, both literary and artistic, is expressed in this little square of grave coloring. So, in the numerous South Sea Island studies which have filled many a frame and delighted so many a student of water-color drawings, it is hard to say whether the pictures of movement and action, of fishing with cormorants, of riding and marching, of bustle and life, or the pictures of tropical and oriental men and women in repose, are more delightful—half naked girls carrying canoes, seated dancers going through the sacred movements of the siva, portraits of individuals, and studies of groups intended to preserve for the artist the recollection, and for the instruction of those at home the singular life, of these brown islanders, so different from the negroids of the southern groups, so over-civilized in ceremony and tradition, with all their lack of policing and of steady social conditions. In all this work the artist's indifference to the accepted conventional ways of expressing his meaning is altogether fortunate for his art. He knows how to tell a story in pictures which have very much, if not all, of his highest artistic qualities, and this he would hardly be capable of were he more fettered than he is by the rules of the academies as to how the action of man should be put into form and color.

A Study.

Study for Bacchanal Drawing.

In connection with this matter, the question comes up how far Mr. La Farge is a thorough draughtsman. It hardly becomes one who is not ready to go into the minute examination of his work, figure by figure, to challenge its merit in the way of anatomical correctness and academic severity of drawing; but it is to be said, at least, that the strongest reason exists for the belief that many of the draped figures would prove incorrect if an absolutely accurate drawing of the nude body in the position assumed by the draped figure could be laid upon the drapery. It is difficult here to express one's exact meaning, because there is no such thing as an absolutely correct drawing of the nude body in any position; but if we take a draped angel or a draped St. Peter or a draped Buddhist priest from this gallery of pictured men and women, we can imagine the consummate draughtsman, the Paul Veronese of the present, if there were such a man, pointing out that a figure seated or standing in that position could not get within the drapery which the artist has pictured. We can even imagine the painter aware of the fact—in advance of all criticism by others. It will be observed that La Farge has seldom painted the nude. His early work involved a great deal of drawing, both from the nude model and in the way of designed and composed nude figures. Naked figures represented on a small scale, as among his numerous Eastern subjects, exist, of course, in his work in great numbers; but the nude in the larger European sense of elaborately rendered, well modelled, thoroughly understood naked figures, male and female, is rare in his work. Mural painting in churches hardly allows of that; glass is, of course, wholly foreign in its purpose and mission from such art as includes the nude, and hardly allows even of the naked hands and head. Now, let it be admitted for the moment not only that La Farge is not given to drawing the nude, but even that he has not done consummate work in that direction; let that be admitted, and let us then see how that affects his pictures and drawings. It need not be asked whether it affects the decorative value of his work—considered as a body of art it cannot affect it badly; we need think, now, only of fine drawing considered by itself. It is a part of the true traditional doctrine of art that no man should paint from the model, nude or draped; that no man should draw from the model, nude or draped, with the intention of using the drawing upon his wall surface or canvas. It is a tradition which ought to have been left intact as it came from older men, that when the artist composes it is his duty to forget his anatomy and to forget the preparatory drawings which he has made by hundreds, and to draw directly upon his canvas or sheet of paper the figure which he now conceives as a part of his design, the figure which he desires to put into his composition as one of its elements. He is free then to do what La Farge himself does freely, to compare this result with the model, nude or draped, or first nude and then draped; but this comparison has for its purpose, not the correction of the drawing or the picture with reference to its anatomical correctness nearly so much as it has in view the lifelike appearance of the figure. Given a draped figure which does not seem to stand quite as firmly upon its feet, or to be moving quite as freely, as the composer himself desires, it is required by consultation of the model to rectify those errors in the drawing which have led to this unfortunate result and to give to that figure the lifelike character which it does not yet possess.

Study for the Watson Window, 1889.

This is the one carried out and sent to the Paris Exposition.

It is a characteristic of Mr. La Farge's art as a painter that he is primarily a colorist. Now it is fairly safe to say that no man since the great Venetians has been at once a consummate draughtsman of the human figure and a consummate master of color; and that apparently the mind of the workman cannot lead his artistic production in such paths that both of these excellences may be attained at once. The workman, if he is sincere, and if he is well advised, follows the course which is easiest for him, and if he conceives of every figure and every group of figures with their setting of landscape or architecture primarily as a piece of splendid coloring, to be taken from nature as an abstract piece of coloring, and so modified that it will tell as an abstract piece of coloring on canvas or on wall—if that is the artist's object he will not improve the work produced on these lines by giving his time and strength to the proposed consideration of accuracy of drawing.

To ask whether La Farge's work would be artistically better if it were consummate in drawing is to ask a question which no one can answer. It is certain that no wise student will go to La Farge to learn figure drawing in the technical sense. It is not that which his art offers the student. There are, however, two large pictures, which can hardly be challenged—the two lunettes in the Villard-Reid house; and it is probable that if these pictures were within easy reach of the public, and could be seen as the wall paintings in the Congressional Library can be seen by all the world and every day, they would tend to raise the general opinion of La Farge's capacity and range as a painter beyond what even his admirers now hold. The pictures represent "The Dance" and "Music." In each of them, smiling landscape forms the background, a landscape not to be called sunny because the work of the true colorist hardly allows of sunshine. Sunshine and full glowing color are not generally found possible of simultaneous presentation, and La Farge certainly makes no attempt to combine them. If, then, we consider one of these two groups of six or eight maidens invested in rather bright and high-lighted colors and set off by a landscape somewhat deeper in tone than their own figures—if we consider each of these pictures as a mural painting intended to be festal in character and to glorify and heighten the beauty of the room which it adorns, while at the same time it is in itself a piece of coloring of almost the highest quality—we have then, perhaps, the fairest and most complete idea of what one of these lunettes is as a work of art—what it has been in the artist's well-realized purpose. The beauty of composition in line and mass in either of the pictures, noticeable as it is, is not important in comparison. The power of line-composition is not very rare; except in its very highest manifestation, it is almost like correct spelling; necessary, but deserving no special remark. But when it is said of any picture that it is a piece of coloring of the highest or almost the highest rank, there has been said of it the utmost that can be said of a work of graphic art. It is not claimed that color is essentially greater or nobler than form, but that color is the graphic artist's especial domain, in which he alone can rule; and further, that color is peculiarly artistical, ideal, abstract, and in this way loftier. Is it possible for the mind of man to conceive of anything more perfect, more remote from, and, in a sense, superior to, whatever else there is in the world of humanity than a color composition of the highest quality? There is only one product of the human mind which can be compared with it; a musical composition of the highest class; a symphony of Beethoven, alone, can be compared to a great composition by Titian. That such a color-gift and such a color-purpose are to be seen in all of Mr. La Farge's work alike would be hardly too much to say. The touch of the consummate colorist is not as evident, but is as discoverable by one who knows how to look, in a piece of nature-study from Fiji, six inches square, as it is in a large composition of saints and angels. The disposition and the power to give to tinted paper the glow, the radiance, the wealth and charm of that strange and inexplicable thing, the mingling of tints into a resulting color-scheme—these are in small work the same essentially that they are in large. Nor is the background of the Ascension picture in the eponymic church to be exalted above the bits of hillside and surf in the drawings of oceanic life, otherwise than as its greater size allows it greater splendor.

Monument in Newport Cemetery
Erected Under the Direction
of John La Farge
and Augustus St. Gaudens.

That this power over color is the life and soul of the decorator need hardly be urged. Decoration which is applied to a flat surface and which is not in relief, except, perhaps, to a slight extent and occasionally, has for its main object, its main desideratum, richness or refinement of coloring, or both. If one has a wall to decorate, the first idea of the true decorator is to invest it with splendor or with delicate strength of color. He seeks for fresco, or the encaustic process, or mosaic, or, as in modern times, oil-painting upon a strained canvas, indifferently and according to the spirit of his time and the practice of his contemporaries; but his object is one and the same—to invest his wall or ceiling with noble color. Little may he care what the subject of the painting or mosaic may be. According to the requirements of the epoch or community in which he lives, it may be a procession of saints or a dance of bacchanals; the primary object which he has in view is to procure a most enjoyable and delightful piece of color—and other things are of secondary importance. Glass, then, would seem to be especially prepared for La Farge's work, and La Farge especially prepared for glass. Consider the memorial window which fills a window-opening in a church at North Easton, Mass., a town which owes much to the lady whose memory is thus honored. Upon a background of broken and changing blue are relieved the three figures larger than life-size which nearly fill the opening. Two of these figures are clothed, one in drapery of the most vivid green, the other in drapery of orange-brown; that is to say, these are the general colors offered to the eye of the spectator by the infinite number of minor tints, all passing into one another in subtle gradation, which make up the general mass of drapery. It is to be observed, then, that these figures are also seen to be clothed in rags, and that the idea, the notion of wretchedness and tatters is maintained in spite of the sumptuous clothing of glowing color which invests it all. That is an instance as good as can be found of what the colorist has to do in this world. He does not ask whether beggars have ever been dressed in such garments as have been described, but he has to express the two-fold image, Beggary and splendid color, and out of these he makes up his work of art, as unlike as may be to anything in nature, but none the worse for that. To return to mural painting; there is one merit which all La Farge's brother-painters agree in awarding to him, and that is the power of putting a painting upon the wall so that it does not change the character of the wall as a part of the building. His painting takes nothing away from the solidity of the wall which it invests. The upright mass retains its rigidity and weight, it still carries the roof, it still holds firmly to the adjoining walls, it is a massive and trustworthy part of the construction, and the painted picture has added to rather than taken from its permanent and resting quality. How this is done is fully as inexplicable as is the glow and splendor of color itself. No one can say abstractly and without having the picture immediately before him how any such result is attained, nor is it easy to explain the picture, even to the looker-on, in any such terms as will fully express this quality. It is one of the most valuable qualities which mural painting can possess—mural painting which fluctuates between the flatness which is also feebleness and a kind of realism which carries with it the effect of out-of-doors—of a hole in the wall. The same thing obtains in his minor work, and here the background, the temple, or rock, forty feet away, is as perfectly detached from the foreground figures as would be a distant and airy mountain miles away, while still the picture remains flat cardboard or flat canvass invested with light and shade and color.

"Athens." Mural Painting in the Walker Art Gallery at Bowdoin College.

We are brought naturally to the consideration of Mr. La Farge's landscape. He is not generally considered as a landscape painter; and yet he has produced a great deal of landscape in the secondary or accessory part of his work. He has also painted landscape of first intention, so to speak, landscape which is nothing but landscape, and that, at different times in his life; always succeeding, and yet always turning away from landscape to what seems to be his chosen work of figure subject used decoratively. Landscape-painting is unquestionably the art of our epoch, the one branch of the art of painting which this century has excelled in; and, therefore, La Farge was inevitably drawn toward landscape painting, he being a man of his time, if also a man of strong individual peculiarities. It would be hard for a student of art in the abstract, a theorizer, a critic and a lover of the arts of the past, to avoid painting landscape when everybody around him is painting landscape; and accordingly La Farge has turned his attention to that, but the odd thing is that he has not stayed there, that he has not continued to be a landscape painter primarily. It would seem to the hasty observer of landscape painting that this department of art alone would have afforded material for all of his artistic dreams and for all his artistic purposes, for what is more truly decorative than landscape such as is shown in the wonderful Paradise Valley? That picture is made up of light and color. The surface of thick, lush, summer grass, the surface of rock dimly seen, the surface of ocean, the hazy sky, all together go to form a mass of glowing and yet delicate color the like of which it is very hard to find in simple landscape anywhere in ancient or modern art. Until recent years there were only half a dozen such pictures of wide landscape, numerous as were his studies in that style; for otherwise his finished landscapes were chiefly those composed of foreground rock, of iris seen against a wild-rose covered bank, of three or four water-lily blossoms and a dozen little buds floating on still water; or else they were landscape backgrounds to figure subjects in which the landscape was evidently made, of deliberate purpose, a thing of less intention and of inferior interest. During the last ten years, however, La Farge has produced an immense number of singularly effective drawings in monochrome and in color, made either on the spot in Samoa, in Fiji, in Japan, or elsewhere in the far East, or made after his return home, from studies carefully noted during his stay abroad. Of these landscape drawings, some are of extended and really vast stretches of country. Mountains are introduced which are several miles away, and show in relief against a pale sky, every detail of the mountain being rendered as the eye could have seen it from the point of view occupied by the painter, and the whole wrought into a wonderfully glowing panorama of green passing into blue against the green mystery of the firmament. There are also among these drawings pictures which are Turnerian in their love of and sympathy with mist and vapor and their enjoyment of pure and delightful color produced by sunlight upon such vapor. Among these are four drawings of the Valley of Tokio seen from a hill above the city, the vision of the artist reaching across the valley and including its whole extent and the mountains which form the boundary. In other words, each of these landscapes includes a range of one hundred square miles of country at least, and its investing and overflowing drapery of cloud and of low-lying vapor; and yet these were four small drawings, mere studies on leaves of a sketch-book. It is the greatest misfortune to Americans that they have been scattered among four different owners. If it were possible for the Boston Museum, under its wise direction, to gather these four drawings into its ownership and to exhibit them side by side well lighted and isolated from other conflicting art, a real service would be done to the whole community of art students; for there is in them an abundance of the true landscape feeling, of the true landscape sympathy, of that love of the magnificence, and the refinement of nature which no transcript can give, but which the thought of the artist when stimulated powerfully by the contemplation of the glory of nature will transfer to his material medium.

Much of this character exists in the sepia drawing of the "Dry Bed of the Dayagawa River," [[page 7]] which hardly needs analysis in words, since it is capable of fairly complete reproduction.

A Study.

Skerryvore.

THE LETTERS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Edited by Sidney Colvin

FROM BOURNEMOUTH: 1884-1885

In order of date the letters now to be quoted follow next on those from the French Riviera which were printed in the April number. When in the late spring of 1884 Stevenson was prostrated by the worst of all his many attacks of hemorrhage from the lung, he was still residing in that chalet at Hyères which he had hoped to make his permanent abode. Partly the renewed failure of his health, and partly a bad outbreak of cholera in the old Provençal town, which occurred in the ensuing summer, compelled him to abandon this hope. As soon as he recovered strength enough to be able to travel by even the easiest stages, he moved to Royat in Auvergne, and thence in the course of July to England. After consultation with several doctors, all of whom held out good hopes of ultimate recovery in spite of the gravity of his present symptoms, he moved to Bournemouth. Here he found in the heaths and pine-woods some distant semblance of the landscape of his native Scotland, and in sandy curves of the Channel coast a passable substitute for the bays and promontories of his beloved Mediterranean. At all events he liked the place well enough to be willing to try it for a home: and such it became for all but three years, from September, 1884, to August, 1887. These, although in the matter of health the worst and most trying years of his life, were in the matter of work some of the most active and successful. For the first two or three months the Stevensons occupied a lodging on the West Cliff called Wensleydale; for the next three or four, from December, 1884, to March, 1885, they were tenants of a house named Bonallie Towers, pleasantly situated amid the pine-woods of Branksome Park; and lastly, about Easter, 1885, they entered into occupation of a house of their own, given by the elder Stevenson to his son, and re-named by the latter Skerryvore, in reminiscence of one of the great lighthouse works carried out by the family firm off the Scottish coast. During all the time of Stevenson's residence at Bournemouth he was compelled to lead the life, irksome to him above all men, but borne with invincible sweetness and patience, of a chronic invalid and almost constant prisoner to the house. He was hardly ever free for more than a few weeks at a time from fits of hemorrhage, fever, and prostration, accompanied by the nervous exhaustion and general distress consequent equally upon the attacks themselves and upon the remedies which the physicians were constrained to employ against them. A great part of his time was spent in bed, and there almost all his literary work was produced. Often for days, and sometimes for weeks together, he was forbidden to speak aloud, and compelled to carry on conversation with his family and friends in whispers or with the help of pencil and paper. The few excursions to a distance which he attempted—most commonly to my house, at the British Museum, once to Matlock, once to Exeter, and once in 1886 as far as Paris—these excursions almost always ended in a break-down and a hurried retreat to home and bed. Nevertheless, seizing on and making the most of every week, nay, every day and hour of respite, he contrived to produce work surprising alike, under the circumstances, by quantity and quality. During the first two months of his life at Bournemouth the two plays Admiral Guinea and Beau Austin were written in collaboration with Mr. Henley. In 1885 he published three volumes, viz.: More New Arabian Nights, the Child's Garden of Verses, and Prince Otto (the two latter, it is true, having been for the most part written a year or two earlier, at Hyères). In 1886 appeared The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Kidnapped, the two books which, together with Treasure Island, did most to win for him the fame and honor which he ever afterward enjoyed among readers on both sides of the Atlantic. At the same time he was a fairly frequent contributor of essays to magazines and of stories to Christmas annuals and other periodical collections. The year 1887, the last of his life in the old country, was chiefly, with the exception of the Life of Fleeming Jenkin, a year of collections and re-prints; in it were published Underwoods, The Merry Men, Memories and Portraits, and the Black Arrow in volume form.

The correspondence of these three invalid years at Bournemouth is naturally in a less buoyant key than that of the relatively flourishing and happy year at Hyères which preceded them. But it is none the less full of interest, and of that vivid play of mood and character which never failed in him whether he was sick or well. The specimens which I shall here give will be taken, with a few exceptions, from his communications with his brother men of letters, including some whose acquaintance or friendship he had now for the first time formed, as Mr. Henry James, Mr. William Archer, and Mr. Locker-Lampson, besides such intimate friends and associates of earlier days as Mr. Henley, Mr. Gosse, Mr. Symonds and myself.

But first come two or three to his parents and other correspondents:

Bournemouth, Sunday, 28th September, 1884.

My dear People,—I keep better, and am to-day downstairs for the first time. I find the lockers entirely empty; not a cent to the front. Will you pray send us some? It blows an equinoctial gale, and has blown for nearly a week. Nimbus Britannicus; piping wind, lashing rain; the sea is a fine colour, and wind-bound ships lie at anchor under the Old Harry rocks, to make one glad to be ashore.

The Henleys are gone, and two plays practically done. I hope they may produce some of the ready.—I am, ever affectionate son,

R. L. S.

Wensleydale, Bournemouth,
October 3rd, 1884.

Dear Mr. Chatto.—I have an offer of £25 for Otto from America. I do not know if you mean to have the American rights; from the nature of the contract, I think not; but if you understood that you were to sell the sheets, I will either hand over the bargain to you, or finish it myself and hand you over the money if you are pleased with the amount. You see, I leave this quite in your hands. To parody an old Scotch story of servant and master: if you don't know that you have a good author, I know that I have a good publisher. Your fair, open, and handsome dealings are a good point in my life, and do more for my crazy health than has yet been done by any doctor.—Very truly yours,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

[Mr. Stevenson, the elder, had read the play of Admiral Guinea, written in September by his son and Mr. Henley in collaboration, and had objected, with his usual energy of expression, to the stage confrontation of profane blackguarding, in the person of Pew, with evangelical piety in that of the reformed slaving captain who gives his name to the piece.]

Bonallie Towers,
Branksome Park,
Bournemouth,
(The three B's),
(November 5th, 1884).

My Dear Father,—Allow me to say, in a strictly Pickwickian sense, that you are a silly fellow. I am pained indeed, but how should I be offended? I think you exaggerate; I cannot forget that you had the same impression of the Deacon; and yet, when you saw it played, were less revolted than you looked for; and I will still hope that the Admiral also is not so bad as you suppose. There is one point, however, where I differ from you very frankly. Religion is in the world; I do not think you are the man to deny the importance of its rôle; and I have long decided not to leave it on one side in art. The opposition of the Admiral and Mr. Pew is not, to my eyes, either horrible or irreverent; but it may be, and it probably is, very ill done: what then? This is a failure; better luck next time; more power to the elbow, more discretion, more wisdom in the design, and the old defeat becomes the scene of the new victory. Concern yourself about no failure; they do not cost lives, as in engineering; they are the pierres perdues of successes. Fame is (truly) a vapour; do not think of it; if the writer means well and tries hard, no failure will injure him, whether with God or man.

I wish I could hear a brighter account of yourself; but I am inclined to acquit the Admiral after having a share in the responsibility. My very heavy cold is, I hope, drawing off; and the change to this charming house in the forest will, I hope, complete my re-establishment.—With love to all, believe me, your ever affectionate,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

[About the same time, Mr. T. Stevenson was in some hesitation as to letting himself be proposed for the office of President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.]

Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth,
November, 1884.

My Dear Father,—I have no hesitation in recommending you to let your name go up; please yourself about an address; though, I think, if we could meet, we could arrange something suitable; but what you propose would be well enough in a way; but so modest as to suggest a whine. From that point of view it would be better to change a little; but this, whether we meet or not, we must discuss. Tait, Crystal, the Royal Society, and I, all think you amply deserve this honour and far more; it is not the True Blue to call this serious compliment a "trial"; you should be glad of this recognition. As for resigning, that is easy enough if found necessary; but to refuse would be husky, unsatisfactory, and a trifle rotten. Sic subs.

R. L. S.

My cold is still very heavy; but I carry it well. Fanny is very much out of sorts, principally through perpetual misery with me. I fear I have been a little in the dumps, which, as you know, sir, is a very great sin. I must try to be more cheerful; but my cough is so severe—my uvula, larynx, and pharynx being all to pot—that I have sometimes most exhausting nights and very peevish wakenings. However, this shall be remedied, and last night I was distinctly better than the night before. There is, my dear Mr. Stevenson (so I moralise blandly as we sit together on the devil's garden-wall), no more abominable sin than this gloom, this plaguey peevishness; why (say I) what matters it if we be a little uncomfortable—that is no reason for mangling our unhappy wives. And then I turn and girn on the unfortunate Cassandra.—Your fellow culprit,

R. L. S.

With reference to the two following letters, it should be explained that Stevenson and his old Edinburgh friend and comrade, Mr. Baxter (who was also his man of business), were accustomed in their correspondence, as the whim took them, to merge their own identities in those of two fictitious personages, Johnson-Thomson and Thomson-Johnson, ex-elders of the Kirk and types of a certain cast of Edinburgh character. Their language is of the broadest Scots; and for some readers it may be desirable to mention that "hoast" means cough and "sculduddery" loose talk.

Bonallie Towers, Branksome Park,
Bournemouth, November 11th.

My Dear Charles,—I am in my new house, thus proudly styled, as you perceive: but the deevil a tower ava' can be perceived (except out of window); this is not as it should be; one might have hoped, at least, a turret. We are all vilely unwell. I put in the dark watches imitating a donkey with some success, but little pleasure; and in the afternoon I indulge in a smart fever, accompanied by aches and shivers. There is thus little monotony to be deplored; and what might still weigh upon me my wife lightens by various inexplicable attacks, now in the pleasant morn, now at the noon of night. I, at least, am a regular invalid; I would scorn to bray in the afternoon; I would indignantly refuse the proposal to fever in the night. What is bred in the bone will come out, sir, in the flesh; and the same spirit that prompted me to date my letter regulates the hour and character of my attacks.—I am, sir, yours,

Thomson.

Postmark, Bournemouth,
13th November, 1884.

My dear Thomson,—It's a maist remarkable fac', but nae shüner had I written yon braggin', blawin' letter aboot ma business habits, when bang! that very day, my hoast begude in the aifternune. It is really remaurkable; it's providenshle, I believe. The ink wasnae fair dry, the wards werenae well ooten ma mouth, when bang, I got the lee. The mair ye think o't, Thomson, the less ye'll like the looks o't. Proavidence (I'm no sayin') is all verra weel in its place; but if proavidence has nae mainners, wha's to learn't? Proavidence is a fine thing, but hoo would you like proavidence to keep your till for ye? The richt place for proavidence is in the Kirk; it has naething to do wi' private correspondence between twa gentlemen, nor freendly cracks, nor a wee bit word of sculduddery ahint the door, nor, in shoart, wi' ony hole-and-corner wark, what I would call. I'm pairfec'ly willin' to meet in wi' Proavidence, I'll be prood to meet in wi' him, when my time's come and I cannae doe nae better; but if he's to come skinking aboot my stairfit, damned, I might as weel be deid for a' the comfort I'll can get in life. Cannae he no be made to understand that it's beneath him? Gosh, if I was in his business, I wouldnae steer my heid for a plain, auld ex-elder that, tak him the way he taks himsel', 's just aboot as honest as he can weel afford, an' but for a wheen auld scandals, near forgotten noo, is a pairfectly respectable and thoroughly decent man. Or if I fashed wi' him ava', it wad be kind o' handsome like; a punnote under his stair door, or a bottle o' auld, blended malt to his bit marnin', as a teshtymonial like you ye ken sae weel aboot, but mair successfu'.

Dear Thomson, have I ony money. If I have, send it for the loard's sake.

Johnson.

[The following to Mr. Henry James, who from about this time began to be a frequent and ever welcome visitor at the Bournemouth home, refers to the essay of R. L. S. called a "Humble Remonstrance," which had just appeared in Longman's Magazine. Mr. James had written holding out the prospect of a continuance of the friendly controversy which had thus been opened up between them on the aims and qualities of fiction.]

Bonallie Towers, Branksome Park,
Bournemouth, December 8th, 1884.

My dear Henry James,—This is a very brave hearing from more points than one. The first point is that there is a hope of a sequel. For this I laboured. Seriously, from the dearth of information and thoughtful interest in the art of literature, those who try to practice it with any deliberate purpose run the risk of finding no fit audience. People suppose it is "the stuff" that interests them; they think, for instance, that the prodigious fine thoughts and sentiments in Shakespeare impress by their own weight, not understanding that the unpolished diamond is but a stone. They think that striking situations, or good dialogue, are got by studying life; they will not rise to understand that they are prepared by deliberate artifice and set off by painful suppressions. Now, I want the whole thing well ventilated, for my own education and the public's; and I beg you to look as quick as you can, to follow me up with every circumstance of defeat where we differ, and (to prevent the flouting of the laity) to emphasise the points where we agree. I trust your paper will show me the way to a rejoinder; and that rejoinder I shall hope to make with so much art as to woo or drive you from your threatened silence. I would not ask better than to pass my life in beating out this quarter of corn with such a seconder as yourself.

Point the second, I am rejoiced indeed to hear you speak so kindly of my work: rejoiced and surprised. I seem to myself a very rude, left-handed countryman; not fit to be read, far less complimented, by a man so accomplished, so adroit, so craftsmanlike as you. You will happily never have cause to understand the despair with which a writer like myself considers (say) the park scene in Lady Barberina. Every touch surprises me by its intangible precision; and the effect when done, as light as syllabub, as distinct as a picture, fills me with envy. Each man among us prefers his own aim, and I prefer mine; but when we come to speak of performance, I recognise myself, compared with you, to be a lout and slouch of the first water.

Where we differ, both as to the design of stories and the delineation of character, I begin to lament. Of course, I am not so dull as to ask you to desert your walk; but could you not, in one novel, to oblige a sincere admirer, and to enrich his shelves with a beloved volume, could you not, and might you not, cast your characters in a mould a little more abstract and academic (dear Mrs. Pennyman had already, among your other work, a taste of what I mean), and pitch the incidents, I do not say, in any stronger, but in a slightly more emphatic key—as it were an episode from one of the old (so-called) novels of adventure? I fear you will not; and I suppose I must sighingly admit you to be right. And yet, when I see, as it were, a book of Tom Jones handled with your exquisite precision and shot through with those side-lights of reflection in which you excel, I relinquish the dear vision with regret. Think upon it.

As you know, I belong to that besotted class of man, the invalid; this puts me to a stand in the way of visits. But it is possible that some day you may feel that a day near the sea and among pinewoods would be a pleasant change from town. If so, please let us know; and my wife and I will be delighted to put you up and give you what we can to eat and drink (I have a fair bottle of claret).—On the back of which, believe me, yours sincerely,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

P.S.—I reopen this to say that I have re-read my paper, and cannot think I have at all succeeded in being either veracious or polite. I knew, of course, that I took your paper merely as a pin to hang my own remarks upon; but, alas! what a thing is any paper! What fine remarks can you not hang on mine! How I have sinned against proportion and, with every effort to the contrary, against the merest rudiments of courtesy to you! You are, indeed, a very acute reader to have divined the real attitude of my mind, and I can only conclude, not without closed eyes and shrinking shoulders, in the well-worn words

Lay on, Macduff!

[During a crippling fit of ill-health, Stevenson had received a commission for a sensational story for the Christmas number of the Pall Mall Gazette. The commission ended in his sending the managers of the paper a recast of a gruesome tale which he had written and condemned in the Highlands three years before, The Body-Snatcher. He rightly thought this beneath his own standard of merit, and would not take the full fee which had been offered for it. Two of the following letters to Mr. Henley refer to this matter: Bloody Jack, or Jacques, let it be understood, was his regular nickname for his arch-enemy, hemorrhage from the lungs.]

[Dec. 1884.]

Dear Man,—1st Disagreeable. Do try and lay your hands on these three poems; they were surely not lost in transmission? It seems hard I should have to make them a third time.

2d Disagreeable. I have done a kind of a damned machine for the P. M. G., and have near died of it—(weakness, insomnia, Bloody Jacquerie)—and am now so dissatisfied that I have told them not to pay me till I see a proof. I think, or I fear I will think, it is not worth the money offered; in which case, of course, I will not take it.—Yours ever,

[Dec. 1884.]

Dear Lad,—I have made up my mind about the P. M. G., and send you a copy, which please keep or return. As for not giving a reduction, what are we? Are we artists or city men? Why do we sneer at stockbrokers? O nary; I will not take the £40. I took that as a fair price for my best work; I was not able to produce my best; and I will be damned if I steal with my eyes open. Sufficit. This is my lookout. As for the paper being rich, certainly it is; but I am honourable. It is no more above me in money than the poor slaveys and cads from whom I look for honesty are below me. Am I Pepys, that because I can find the countenance of "some of our ablest merchants," that because —— and —— pour forth languid twaddle and get paid for it, I, too, should "cheerfully continue to steal"? I am not Pepys. I do not live much to God and honour; but I will not wilfully turn my back on both. I am, like all the rest of us, falling ever lower from the bright ideas I began with, falling into greed, into idleness, into middle-aged and slippered fireside cowardice; but is it you, my bold blade, that I hear crying this sordid and rank twaddle in my ear? Preaching the dankest Grundyism and upholding the rank customs of our trade—you, who are so cruel hard upon the customs of the publishers? O man, look at the Beam in our own Eyes; and whatever else you do, do not plead Satan's cause, or plead it for all; either embrace the bad, or respect the good when you see a poor devil trying for it. If this is the honesty of authors—to take what you can get and console yourself because publishers are rich—take my name from the rolls of that association. 'Tis a caucus of weaker thieves, jealous of the stronger.—Ever yours,

The Roaring R. L. S.

You will see from the enclosed that I have stuck to what I think my dues pretty tightly in spite of this flourish; these are my words for a poor ten-pound note!

Stevenson's Skye Terrier "Bogue."
From a photograph made at Hyères.

[Christmas, 1884.]

My Dear Lad,—Here was I in bed; Bloody Jack; not writing, not hearing, and finding myself gently and agreeably ill used; and behold I learn you are bad yourself. Get your wife to send us a word how you are. I am better decidedly. Bogue got his Christmas card, and behaved well for three days after. It may interest the cynical to learn that I started this hæmorrhage by too sedulous attentions to my dear Bogue. The stick was broken; and that night Bogue, who was attracted by the extraordinary aching of his bones, and is always inclined to a serious view of his own ailments, announced with his customary pomp that he was dying. In this case, however, it was not the dog that died. (He had tried to bite his mother's ankles.) I have written, with the aid of bloudie Jack, a long and peculiarly solemn paper on the technical elements of style. It is path-breaking and epoch-making; but I do not think the public will be readily convoked to its perusal. Did I tell you that S. C. had risen to the paper on James? At last! O but I was pleased; he's (like Johnnie) been lang, lang o' comin', but here he is. He will not object to my future manœuvres in the same field, as he has to my former. All the family are here; my father better than I have seen him these two years; my mother the same as ever. I do trust you are better, and I am yours ever,

R. L. S.

[Winter, 1884-5.]

Dear Henley,—We are all to pieces in health, and heavily handicapped with Arabs. [Stories for the New Arabian Nights.] I have a dreadful cough, whose attacks leave me ætat 90. Fanny is quite gone up with my bad health. I never let up on the Arabs, all the same, and rarely get less than eight pages out of hand, though hardly able to come downstairs for twittering knees.

I shall put in ——'s letter. He says so little of his circumstances that I am in an impossibility to give him advice more specific than a copybook. Give him my love, however, and tell him it is the mark of the parochial gentleman who has never travelled to find all wrong in a foreign land. Let him hold on, and he will find one country as good as another; and in the meanwhile let him resist the fatal British tendency to communicate his dissatisfaction with a country to its inhabitants. 'Tis a good idea, but it somehow fails to please. In a fortnight, if I can keep my spirit in the box at all, I should be nearly through this Arabian desert; so can tackle something fresh.—Yours ever,

R. L. S.

[Bournemouth, Winter, 1884-5.]

Dear Boy,—I trust this finds you well; it leaves me so-so. The weather is so cold that I must stick to bed, which is rotten and tedious, but can't be helped.

I find in the blotting book the enclosed, which I wrote to you the eve of my blood. Is it not strange? That night, when I naturally thought I was coopered, the thought of it was much in my mind; I thought it had gone; and I thought what a strange prophecy I had made in jest, and how it was indeed like to be the end of many letters. But I have written a good few since, and the spell is broken. I am just as pleased, for I earnestly desire to live. This pleasant middle age into whose port we are steering is quite to my fancy. I would cast anchor here, and go ashore for twenty years, and see the manners of the place. Youth was a great time, but somewhat fussy. Now in middle age (bar lucre) all seems mighty placid. It likes me; I spy a little bright café in one corner of the port, in front of which I now propose we should sit down. There is just enough of the bustle of the harbour and no more; and the ships are close in, regarding us with stern-windows—the ships that bring deals from Norway and parrots from the Indies. Let us sit down here for twenty years, with a packet of tobacco and a drink, and talk of art and women. By the by, the whole city will sink, and the ships too, and the table, and we also; but we shall have sat for twenty years and had a fine talk; and by that time, who knows? exhausted the subject.

I send you a book which (or I am mistook) will please you; it pleased me. But I do desire a book of adventure—a romance—and no man will get or write me one. Dumas I have read and re-read too often; Scott, too, and I am short. I want to hear swords clash. I want a book to begin in a good way; a book, I guess, like Treasure Island, alas! which I have never read, and cannot though I live to ninety. I would God that some one else had written it! By all that I can learn, it is the very book for my complaint. I like the way I hear it opens; and they tell me John Silver is good fun. And to me it is, and must ever be, a dream unrealised, a book unwritten: O my sighings after romance, or even Skeltery, and O! the weary age which will produce me neither!

CHAPTER I

The night was damp and cloudy, the ways foul. The single horseman, cloaked and booted, who pursued his way across Willesden Common, had not met a traveller, when the sound of wheels—

CHAPTER I

"Yes, sir," said the old pilot, "she must have dropped into the bay a little afore dawn. A queer craft she looks."

"She shows no colours," returned the young gentleman musingly.

"They're a-lowerin' of a quarter-boat, Mr. Mark," resumed the old salt. "We shall soon know more of her."

"Ay," replied the young gentleman called Mark, "and here, Mr. Seadrift, comes your sweet daughter Nancy tripping down the cliff."

"God bless her kind heart, sir," ejaculated old Seadrift.

CHAPTER I

The notary, Jean Rossignol, had been summoned to the top of a great house in the Isle St. Louis to make a will; and now, his duties finished, wrapped in a warm roquelaure and with a lantern swinging from one hand, he issued from the mansion on his homeward way. Little did he think what strange adventures were to befall him!—

That is how stories should begin. And I am offered HUSKS instead.

R. L. S.

[The following letters to myself refer to a project, eagerly embraced at first, but afterward abandoned for want of time and strength, for a short life of Wellington to be contributed to a series edited by Mr. Andrew Lang for Messrs. Longman. In the third letter to me, and in that to Mr. J. A. Symonds which follows it, are expressed something of the feelings of distress and bitterness with which, in common with, but even more deeply than most Englishmen of sense and spirit, Stevenson at this time felt the national disgrace of Gordon's fate in the Soudan.]

Bonallie Tower, Branksome Park,
Bournemouth, Jan. 4th, 1885.

Dear S. C.,—I am on my feet again, and getting on my boots to do the Iron Duke. Conceive my glee: I have refused the £100, and am to get some sort of royalty, not yet decided, instead. 'Tis for Longman's English Worthies, edited by A. Lang. Aw haw!

Now look here, could you get me a loan of the Despatches, or is that a dream? I should have to mark passages I fear, and certainly note pages on the fly. If you think it a dream, will Bain get me a second-hand copy, or who would? The sooner, and cheaper, I can get it the better. If there is anything in your weird library that bears on either the man or the period, put it in a mortar and fire it here instanter: I shall catch. I shall want, of course, an infinity of books: among which, any lives there may be; a life of the Marquis Marmont (the Maréchal), Marmont's Memoirs; Greville's Memoirs; Peel's Memoirs; Napier; that blind man's history of England you once lent me; Hamley's Waterloo; can you get me any of these? Thiers, idle Thiers also. Can you help a man getting into his boots for such a huge campaign? How are you? A good new year to you. I mean to have a good one, but on whose funds I cannot fancy: not mine, leastways; as I am a mere derelict and drift beam-on to bankruptcy.

For God's sake remember the man who set out for to conquer Arthur Wellesley, with a broken bellows and an empty pocket.—Yours ever.

R. L. Shorthouse.

Bournemouth, Jan. or Feb. 1885.

Dear S. C.,—I have addressed a letter to the G. O. M. à propos of Villainton; and I became aware, you will be interested to hear, of an overwhelming respect for the old gentleman. I can blaguer his failures; but when you actually address him, and bring the two statures and records to confrontation, dismay is the result. By mere continuance of years, he must impose; the man who helped to rule England, before I was conceived, strikes me with a new sense of greatness and antiquity, when I must actually beard him with the cold forms of correspondence. I shied at the necessity of calling him plain "Sir"! had he been "My lord," I had been happier; no, I am no equalitarian. Honour to whom honour is due; and if to none, why, then, honour to the old!

These, O Slade Professor, are my unvarnished sentiments: I was a little surprised to find them so extreme, and, therefore, I communicate the fact.

Belabour thy brains, as to whom it would be well to question. I have a small space; I wish to make a popular book, nowhere obscure, nowhere, if it can be helped, unhuman. It seems to me the most hopeful plan to tell the tale, so far as may be, by anecdote. He did not die till so recently, there must be hundreds who remember him, and thousands who have still ungarnered stories. Dear man, to the breach! Up, soldier of the iron dook, up, Slades, and at 'em! (which, conclusively, he did not say: the at 'em-ic theory is to be dismissed). You know piles of fellows who must reek with matter; help! help!

R. L. S.

[Bournemouth, Feb. 1885.]

My dear Colvin,—You are indeed a backward correspondent, and much may be said against you. But in this weather, and O dear! in this political scene of degradation, much must be forgiven. I fear England is dead of Burgessry, and only walks about galvanised. I do not love to think of my countrymen these days; nor to remember myself. Why was I silent? I feel I have no right to blame any one: but I won't write to the G. O. M. I do really not see my way to any form of signature, unless "your fellow criminal in the eyes of God," which might disquiet the proprieties.

About your book, I have always said go on. [This refers to some kind of a scheme, I forget what, for the republication of stray magazine-work of mine under the title Pictures, Places, and People.] The drawing of character is a different thing from publishing the details of a private career. No one objects to the first, or should object, if his name be not put upon it; at the other, I draw the line. In a preface, if you choose, you might distinguish: it is besides, a thing for which you are eminently well equipped, and which you would do with taste and incision. I long to see the book. People like themselves (to explain a little more); no one likes his life, which is a misgotten issue, and a tale of failure. To see these failures either touched upon, or coasted, to get the idea of a spying eye and blabbing tongue about the house is to lose all privacy in life. To see that thing, which we do love, our character set forth, is ever gratifying. See how my Talk and Talkers went; everyone liked his own portrait, and shrieked about other people's; so it will be with yours: if you are the least true to the essential, the sitter will be pleased: very likely not his friends, and that from various motives.

R. L. S.

When will your holiday be? I sent your letter to my wife, and forget. Keep us in mind, and I hope we shall be able to receive you.

Bournemouth, Feb. 1885.

My dear Symonds,—Yes, we have both been very neglectful. I had horrid luck: catching (from kind friends) two thundering influenzas in August and November; I recovered from the last with difficulty: also had great annoyance from hæmorrhagic leaking; but have come through this blustering winter with some general success; in the house, up and down. My wife, however, has been painfully upset by my health. Last year, of course, was cruelly trying to her nerves; Nice and Hyères are bad experiences; and though she is not ill, the doctors tell me that prolonged anxiety may do her a real mischief. She is now at Hyères collecting our goods; and she has been ill there, which has upset my liver and driven me to the friendly calomel on which I now mainly live: it is the only thing that stops the bleeding, which seems directly connected with the circulation of the liver.

I feel a little old and fagged, and chary of speech, and not very sure of spirit in my work; but considering what a year I have passed, and how I have twice sat on Charon's pier-head, I am surprising. The doctors all seem agreed in saying that my complaint is quite unknown, and will allow of no prognosis.

My father has presented us with a very pretty home in this place, into which we hope to move by May. My Child's Verses come out next week. Otto begins to appear in April. More New Arabian Nights as soon as possible. Moreover, I am neck deep in Wellington; also a story on the stocks: The Great North Road. O, I am busy! Lloyd is at college in Edinburgh. That is, I think, all that can be said by the way of news.

Have you read Huckleberry Finn? It contains many excellent things; above all, the whole story of a healthy boy's dealings with his conscience, incredibly well done.

My own conscience is badly seared: a want of piety; yet I pray for it, tacitly, every day; believing it, after courage, the only gift worth having; and its want, in a man of any claims to honour, quite unpardonable. The tone of your letter seemed to me very sound. In these dark days of public dishonour, I do not know that one can do better than carry our private trials piously. What a picture is this of a nation! No man that I can see, on any side or party, seems to have the least sense of our ineffable shame: the desertion of the garrisons. I tell my little parable that Germany took England, and then there was an Indian Mutiny, and Bismarck said: "Quite right: let Delhi and Calcutta and Bombay fall; and let the women and children be treated Sepoy fashion," and people say: "O, but that is very different!" And then I wish I were dead. Millais (I hear) was painting Gladstone when the news came of Gordon's death; Millais was much affected, and Gladstone said: "Why? It is the man's own temerity!" But why should I blame Gladstone, when I too am a Bourgeois? when I have held my peace? Why did I hold my peace? Because I am a sceptic: i.e. a Bourgeois. We believe in nothing, Symonds; you don't, and I don't; and there are two reasons, out of a handful of millions, why England stands before the world dripping with blood and daubed with dishonour. I will first try to take the beam out of my own eye; trusting that even private effort somehow betters and braces the general atmosphere. See, for example, if England has shown (I put it hypothetically) one spark of manly sensibility, they have been shamed into it by the spectacle of Gordon. Police-Officer Cole is the only man that I see to admire. I dedicate my New Arabs to him and Cox, in default of other great public characters.—Yours ever most affectionately,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Bournemouth, March 16th, 1885.

My dear Hamerton,—Various things have been reminding me of my misconduct: First, Swan's application for your address; second, a sight of the sheets of your Landscape book; and last, your note to Swan, which he was so kind as to forward. I trust you will never suppose me to be guilty of anything more serious than an idleness, partially excusable. My ill-health makes my rate of life heavier than I can well meet, and yet stops me from earning more. My conscience, sometimes perhaps too easily stifled, but still (for my time of life and the public manners of the age) fairly well alive, forces me to perpetual and almost endless transcriptions. On the back of all this, any correspondence hangs like a thunder-cloud; and just when I think I am getting through my troubles, crack, down goes my health, I have a long costly sickness, and begin the world again. It is fortunate for me I have a father, or I should long ago have died; but the opportunity of the aid makes the necessity none the more welcome. My father has presented me with a beautiful house here—or so I believe, for I have not yet seen it, being a cage bird but for nocturnal sorties in the garden. I hope we shall soon move into it, and I tell myself that some day perhaps we may have the pleasure of seeing you as our guest. I trust at least that you will take me as I am, a thoroughly bad correspondent, and a man, a hater, indeed, of rudeness in others, but too often rude in all unconsciousness himself; and that you will never cease to believe the sincere sympathy and admiration that I feel for you and for your work.

About the Landscape [Mr. Hamerton's book so called], which I had a glimpse of while a friend of mine was preparing a review, I was greatly interested, and could write and wrangle for a year on every page; one passage particularly delighted me, the part about Ulysses—jolly. Then, you know, that is just what I fear I have come to think landscape ought to be in literature; so there we should be at odds. Or perhaps not so much as I suppose, as Montaigne says it is a pot with two handles, and I own I am wedded to the technical handle, which (I likewise own and freely) you do well to keep for a mistress. I should much like to talk with you about some other points; it is only in talk that one gets to understand. Your delightful Wordsworth trap I have tried on two hardened Wordsworthians, not that I am one myself. By covering up the context, and asking them to guess what the passage was, both (and both are very clever people, one a writer, one a painter) pronounced it a guide-book. "Do you think it an unusually good guide-book?" I asked, and both said, "No, not at all!" Their grimace was a picture when I showed the original.

I trust your health and that of Mrs. Hamerton keep better; your last account was a poor one. I was unable to make out the visit I had hoped, as (I do not know if you heard of it) I had a very violent and dangerous hæmorrhage last spring. I am almost glad to have seen death so close with all my wits about me, and not in the customary lassitude and disenchantment of disease. Even thus clearly beheld I find him not so terrible as we suppose. But, indeed, with the passing of years, the decay of strength, the loss of all my old active and pleasant habits, there grows more and more upon me that belief in the kindness of this scheme of things, and the goodness of our veiled God, which is an excellent and pacifying compensation. I trust, if your health continues to trouble you, you may find some of the same belief. But perhaps my fine discovery is a piece of art, and belongs to a character cowardly, intolerant of certain feelings, and apt to self-deception. I don't think so, however; and when I feel what a weak and fallible vessel I was thrust into this hurly-burly, and with what marvellous kindness the wind has been tempered to my frailties, I think I should be a strange kind of ass to feel anything but gratitude.

I do not know why I should inflict this talk upon you; but when I summon the rebellious pen, he must go his own way; I am no Michael Scott, to rule the fiend of correspondence. Most days he will none of me; and when he comes, it is to rape me where he will,—Yours very sincerely,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

[With Mr. Will H. Low as intermediary, Stevenson had now been entering into relations with Messrs. Scribner's Sons for the publication of his works in America. The following letter refers to this matter and to Mr. Low's proposed dedication to R. L. S. of one of the poems of Keats which he had been illustrating.]

Bonallie Tower, Bournemouth,
March 13th, 1885.

My dear Low,—Your success has been immense. I wish your letter had come two days ago: Otto, alas! has been disposed of a good while ago; but it was only day before yesterday that I settled the new volume of Arabs. However, for the future, you and the sons of the deified Scribner are the men for me. Really they have behaved most handsomely. I cannot lay my hand on the papers, or I would tell you exactly how it compares with my English bargain: but it compares well. Ah! if we had that copyright, I do believe it would go far to make me solvent, ill health and all.

I wrote you a letter to the Rembrandt, in which I stated my views about the dedication in a very brief form. It will give me sincere pleasure; and will make the second dedication I have received: the other being from John Addington Symonds. It is a compliment I value much; I don't know any that I should prefer.

I am glad to hear you have windows to do; that is a fine business, I think; but alas! the glass is so bad nowadays; realism invading even that, as well as the huge inferiority of our technical resource corrupting every tint. Still, anything that keeps a man to decoration is in this age, good for the artist's spirit.

By the way, have you seen James and me on the novel? James, I think in the August or September—R. L. S. in the December Longman. I own I think the école bête, of which I am the champion, has the whiphand of the argument; but as James is to make a rejoinder, I must not boast. Anyway the controversy is amusing to see. I was terribly tied down to space, which has made the end congested and dull. I shall see if I can afford to send you the April Contemporary—but I daresay you see it anyway—as it will contain a paper of mine on style, a sort of continuation of old arguments on art in which you have wagged a most effective tongue. It is a sort of start upon my Treatise on the Art of Literature: a small, arid book that shall some day appear.

With every good wish from me and mine (should I not say "she and hers"?) to you and yours, believe me yours ever,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Do you see much of Marius Townsend? Are you next door to the Doctor's Daughter? or does "North" refer to another "Washington Square" than Henry James's?

[The following to Mr. Gosse refers to the publication of that gentleman's life of Gray, in Mr. Morley's series of English Men of Letters, and of the writer's own, now classic, volume, A Child's Garden of Verses.]

Bonallie Tower, Bournemouth,
March 12, 1885.

My dear Gosse,—I was indeed much exercised how I could be worked into Gray; and lo! when I saw it, the passage seemed to have been written with a single eye to elucidate the ... worst?... well, not a very good poem of Gray's. Your little life is excellent, clean, neat, efficient. I have read many of your notes, too, with pleasure. Your connection with Gray was a happy circumstance; it was a suitable conjunction.

I did not answer your letter from the States, for what was I to say? I liked getting it and reading it; I was rather flattered that you wrote it to me; and then I'll tell you what I did—I put it in the fire. Why? Well, just because it was very natural and expansive; and thinks I to myself, if I die one of these fine nights, this is just the letter that Gosse would not wish to go into the hands of third parties. Was I well inspired? And I did not answer it because you were in your high places, sailing with supreme dominion, and seeing life in a particular glory; and I was peddling in a corner, confined to the house, overwhelmed with necessary work, which I was not always doing well, and, in the very mild form in which the disease approaches me, touched with a sort of bustling cynicism. Why throw cold water? How ape your agreeable frame of mind? In short, I held my tongue.

I have now published on 101 small pages The Complete Proof of Mr. R. L. Stevenson's Incapacity to Write Verse, in a series of graduated examples with table of contents. I think I shall issue a companion volume of exercises: "Analyse this poem. Collect and comminate the ugly words. Distinguish and condemn the chevilles. State Mr. Stevenson's faults of taste in regard to the measure. What reasons can you gather from this example for your belief that Mr. S. is unable to write any other measure?"

They look ghastly in the cold light of print; but there is something nice in the little ragged regimen; for all; the blackguards seem to me to smile; to have a kind of childish treble note that sounds in my ears freshly; not song, if you will, but a child's voice.

I was glad you enjoyed your visit to the States. Most Englishmen go there with a confirmed design of patronage, as they go to France for that matter; and patronage will not pay. Besides, in this year of—grace, said I?—of disgrace, who should creep so low as an Englishman? "It is not to be thought of that the flood"—ah, "Wordsworth," you would change your note were you alive to-day!

I am now a beastly householder, but have not yet entered on my domain. When I do, the social revolution will probably cast me back upon my dung heap. There is a person called Hyndman whose eye is on me; his step is beHynd me as I go. I shall call my house Skerryvore when I get it: Skerryvore: c'est bon pour la poéshie. I will conclude with my favourite sentiment: "The world is too much with me."

Robert Louis Stevenson,
The Hermit of Skerryvore.

Author of "John Vane Tempest: a Romance," "Herbert and Henrietta: or the Nemesis of Sentiment," "The Life and Adventures of Colonel Bludyer Fortescue," "Happy Homes and Hairy Faces," "A Pound of Feathers and a Pound of Lead," part author of "Minn's Complete Capricious Correspondent: a Manual of Natty, Natural, and Knowing Letters," and editor of the "Poetical Remains of Samuel Burt Crabbe, known as the melodious Bottle-Holder."

Uniform with the above:

"The Life and Remains of the Reverend Jacob Degray Squah," author of "Heave-yo for the New Jerusalem." "A Box of Candles; or the Patent Spiritual Safety Match," and "A Day with the Heavenly Harriers."

[The two following letters refer to the sudden death of Professor Fleeming Jenkin, with whom, and with his wife, Stevenson from his early student days maintained unbroken kindness and friendship.]

Skerryvore, Bournemouth
[Midsummer, 1885].

My dear Mrs. Jenkin,—You know how much and for how long I have loved, respected, and admired him; I am only able to feel a little with you. But I know how he would have wished us to feel. I never knew a better man, nor one to me more lovable; we shall all feel the loss more greatly as time goes on. It scarce seems life to me; what must it be to you? Yet one of the last things that he said to me was, that from all these sad bereavements of yours he had learned only more than ever to feel the goodness and what we, in our feebleness, call the support of God; he had been ripening so much—to other eyes than ours, we must suppose he was ripe, and try to feel it. I feel it is better not to say much more. It will be to me a great pride to write a notice of him: the last I can now do. What more in any way I can do for you, please to think and let me know. For his sake and for your own, I would not be a useless friend: I know, you know me a most warm one; please command me or my wife, in any way. Do not trouble to write to me; Austin, I have no doubt, will do so, if you are, as I fear you will be, unfit.

My heart is sore for you. At least you know what you have been to him; how he cherished and admired you, how he was never so pleased as when he spoke of you; with what a boy's love, up to the last, he loved you. This surely is a consolation. Yours is the cruel part: to survive; you must try and not grudge to him his better fortune, to go first. It is the sad part of such relations that one must remain and suffer; I cannot see my poor Jenkin without you. Nor you indeed without him; but you may try to rejoice that he is spared that extremity. Perhaps I (as I was so much his confidant) know even better that you can do, what your loss would have been to him; he never spoke of you but what his face changed; it was—you were—his religion.

I write by this post to Austin and to the Academy.—Yours most sincerely,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Skerryvore, Bournemouth.

My dear Mrs. Jenkin,—I should have written sooner, but we are in a bustle and I have been very tired, though still well. Your very kind note was most welcome to me. I shall be very much pleased to have you call me Louis, as he has now done for so many years. Sixteen, you say? is it so long? It seems too short now; but of that we cannot judge and must not complain.

I wish that either I or my wife could do anything for you; when we can, you will, I am sure, command us.

I trust that my notice gave you as little pain as was possible. I found I had so much to say, that I preferred to keep it for another place and make but a note in the Academy. To try to draw my friend at greater length, and say what he was to me and his intimates, what a good influence in life and what an example, is a desire that grows upon me. It was strange, as I wrote the note, how his old tests and criticisms haunted me; and it reminded me afresh with every few words how much I owe to him.

I had a note from Henley, very brief and very sad. We none of us yet feel the loss; but we know what he would have said and wished.

Do you know that Dew-Smith has two photographs of him, neither very bad; and one giving a lively, though not flattering air of him in conversation? If you have not got them, would you like me to write to Dew and ask him to give you proofs?

I was so pleased that he and my wife had at last made friends; that is a great pleasure. We found and have preserved one fragment (the head) of the drawing he made and tore up when he was last here. He had promised to come and stay with us this summer. May we not hope, at least, some time soon to have one from you?—Believe me, my dear Mrs. Jenkin, with the most real sympathy, your sincere friend,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Dear me, what happiness I owe to both of you!

Skerryvore, Bournemouth,
October 22nd, 1885.

My dear Low,—I trust you are not annoyed with me beyond forgiveness: for indeed my silence has been devilish prolonged. I can only tell you that I have been nearly six months (more than six) in a strange condition of collapse when it was impossible to do any work and difficult (more difficult than you would suppose) to write the merest note. I am now better, but not yet my own man in the way of brains, and in health only so-so. I turn more towards the liver and dyspepsia business, which is damned unpleasant and paralysing; I suppose I shall learn (I begin to think I am learning) to fight this vast, vague feather-bed of an obsession that now overlies and smothers me; but in the beginnings of these conflicts, the inexperienced wrestler is always worsted; and I own I have been quite extinct. I wish you to know, though it can be no excuse, that you are not the only one of my friends by many whom I have thus neglected; and even now, having come so very late into the possession of myself, with a substantial capital of debts, and my work still moving with a desperate slowness—as a child might fill a sandbag with its little handfuls—and my future deeply pledged, there is almost a touch of virtue in my borrowing these hours to write to you. Why I said 'hours' I know not; it would look blue for both of us if I made good the word.

I was writing your address the other day, ordering a copy of my next, Prince Otto, to go your way. I hope you have not seen it in parts; it was not meant to be so read; and only my poverty (dishonourably) consented to the serial evolution.

I will send you with this a copy of the English edition of the Child's Garden. I have heard there is some vile rule of the post-office in the States against inscriptions; so I send herewith a piece of doggerel which Mr. Bunner may, if he thinks fit, copy off the fly leaf.

Sargent was down again and painted a portrait of me walking about in my own dining-room, in my own velveteen jacket and twisting as I go my own moustache; at one corner a glimpse of my wife, in an Indian dress and seated in a chair that was once my grandfather's, but since some months goes by the name of Henry James's, for it was there the novelist loved to sit—adds a touch of poesy and comicality. It is, I think, excellent; but is too eccentric to be exhibited. I am at one extreme corner; my wife, in this wild dress and looking like a ghost, is at the extreme other end; between us an open door exhibits my palatial entrance hall and a part of my respected staircase. All this is touched in lovely, with that witty touch of Sargent's; but of course it looks dam queer as a whole.

Pray let me hear from you and give me good news of yourself and your wife, to whom please remember me.—Yours most sincerely, my dear Low,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

(To be continued.)

"Well, he can't lead me."—[Page 35].

THE CHRONICLES OF AUNT MINERVY ANN
By Joel Chandler Harris

Illustrated by A. B. Frost

AN EVENING WITH THE KU-KLUX

While in Halcyondale attending the county fair I had a good many talks with Aunt Minervy Ann, who was the cook, housekeeper, and general superintendent of Major Tumlin Perdue's household. Some of these conversations have been reported on account of the whiff and flavor of old times which caused them to live in my mind, while others perhaps as important have been forgotten.

In the published reports of these conversations the name of Hamp, Aunt Minervy's husband, often occurs. When a slave, Hamp had belonged to an estate which was in the hands of the Court of Ordinary (or, as it was then called, the Inferior Court), to be administered in the interest of minor heirs. This was not a fortunate thing for the negroes, of which there were above one hundred and fifty. Men, women, and children were hired out, some far and some near. They came back home at Christmas-time, enjoyed a week's frolic, and were then hired out again, perhaps to new employers. But whether to new or old, it is certain that hired hands in those days did not receive the consideration that men gave to their own negroes.

This experience told heavily on Hamp's mind. It made him reserved, suspicious, and antagonistic. He had few pleasant memories to fall back on, and these were of the days of his early youth, when he used to trot around holding to his old master's coat-tails—the kind old master who had finally been sent to the insane asylum. Hamp never got over the idea (he had heard some of the older negroes talking about it) that his old master had been judged to be crazy simply because he was unusually kind to his negroes, especially the little ones. Hamp's after-experience seemed to prove this, for he received small share of kindness, as well as scrimped rations, from those who hired him.

It was a very good thing for Hamp that he married Aunt Minervy Ann, otherwise he would have become a wanderer and a vagabond when freedom came. Even as it was, he didn't miss it a hair's breadth. He "broke loose," as he described it, and went off, but finally came back and tried to persuade Aunt Minervy Ann to leave Major Perdue. How he failed in this has already been reported. He settled down, but he acquired no very friendly feelings toward the white race.

He joined the secret political societies strangely called "Union Leagues," and aided in disseminating the belief that the whites were only awaiting a favorable opportunity to re-enslave his race. He was only repeating what the carpet-baggers had told him. Perhaps he believed the statement, perhaps not. At any rate, he repeated it fervently and frequently, and soon came to be the recognized leader of the negroes in the county of which Halcyondale was the capital. That is to say, the leader of all except one. At church one Sunday night some of the brethren congratulated Aunt Minervy Ann on the fact that Hamp was now the leader of the colored people in that region.

"What colored people?" snapped Aunt Minervy Ann.

"We-all," responded a deacon, emphatically.

"Well, he can't lead me, I'll tell you dat right now!" exclaimed Aunt Minervy Ann.

He wore a blue army overcoat and a stove-pipe hat.—[Page 36].

Anyhow, when the time came to elect members of the Legislature (the constitutional convention had already been held), Hamp was chosen to be the candidate of the negro Republicans. A white man wanted to run, but the negroes said they preferred their own color, and they had their way. They had their way at the polls, too, for, as nearly all the whites who would have voted had served in the Confederate army, they were at that time disfranchised.

So Hamp was elected overwhelmingly, "worl' widout een'," as he put it, and the effect it had on him was a perfect illustration of one aspect of human nature. Before and during the election (which lasted three days) Hamp had been going around puffed up with importance. He wore a blue army overcoat and a stove-pipe hat, and went about smoking a big cigar. When the election was over, and he was declared the choice of the county, he collapsed. His dignity all disappeared. His air of self-importance and confidence deserted him. His responsibilities seemed to weigh him down.

He had once "rolled" in the little printing-office where the machinery consisted of a No. 2 Washington hand-press, a wooden imposing-stone, three stands for the cases, a rickety table for "wetting down" the paper, a tub in which to wash the forms, and a sheet-iron "imposing-stone." This chanced to be my head-quarters, and the day after the election I was somewhat surprised to see Hamp saunter in. So was Major Tumlin Perdue, who was reading the exchanges.

"He's come to demand a retraction," remarked the Major, "and you'll have to set him right. He's no longer plain Hamp; he's the Hon. Hamp—what's your other name?" turning to the negro.

"Hamp Tumlin my fergiven name, suh. I thought 'Nervy tol' you dat."

"Why, who named you after me?" inquired the Major, somewhat angrily.

"Me an' 'Nervy fix it up, suh. She say it's about de purtiest name in town."

The Major melted a little, but his bristles rose again, as it were.

"Look here, Hamp!" he exclaimed in a tone that nobody ever forgot or misinterpreted; "don't you go and stick Perdue onto it. I won't stand that!"

"No, suh!" responded Hamp. "I started ter do it, but 'Nervy Ann say she ain't gwine ter have de Perdue name bandied about up dar whar de Legislatur's at."

Again the Major thawed, and though he looked long at Hamp it was with friendly eyes. He seemed to be studying the negro—"sizing him up," as the saying is. For a newly elected member of the Legislature, Hamp seemed to take a great deal of interest in the old duties he once performed about the office. He went first to the box in which the "roller" was kept, and felt of its surface carefully.

"You'll hatter have a bran new roller 'fo' de mont's out," he said, "an' I won't be here to he'p you make it."

Then he went to the roller-frame, turned the handle, and looked at the wooden cylinders. "Dey don't look atter it like I use ter, suh; an' dish yer frame monst'us shackly."

From there he passed to the forms where the advertisements remained standing. He passed his thumb over the type and looked at it critically. "Dey er mighty skeer'd dey'll git all de ink off," was his comment. Do what he would, Hamp couldn't hide his embarrassment.