Hence the interest which young and old alike have felt in TREASURE
ISLAND, KIDNAPPED, and THE WRECKER - a something which suffices

decisively to mark off these books from the mass with which
superficially they might be classed.

CHAPTER XIX - EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN'S ESTIMATE
It should be clearly remembered that Stevenson died at a little

over forty - the age at which severity and simplicity and breadth
in art but begin to be attained. If Scott had died at the age when

Stevenson was taken from us, the world would have lacked the
WAVERLEY NOVELS; if a like fate had overtaken Dickens, we should

not have had A TALE OF TWO CITIES; and under a similar stroke,
Goldsmith could not have written RETALIATION, or tasted the bitter-

sweet first night of SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER. At the age of forty-
four Mr Thomas Hardy had probably not dreamt of TESS OF THE

D'URBERVILLES. But what a man has already done at forty years is
likely, I am afraid, to be a gauge as well as a promise of what he

will do in the future; and from Stevenson we were entitled to
expect perfect form and continued variety of subject, rather than a

measurable dynamic gain.
This is the point of view which my friend and correspondent of

years ago, Mr Edmund Clarence Stedman, of New York, set out by
emphasising in his address, as President of the meeting under the

auspices of the Uncut Leaves Society in New York, in the beginning
of 1895, on the death of Stevenson, and to honour the memory of the

great romancer, as reported in the NEW YORK TRIBUNE:
"We are brought together by tidings, almost from the Antipodes, of

the death of a belovedwriter in his early prime. The work of a
romancer and poet, of a man of insight and feeling, which may be

said to have begun but fifteen years ago, has ended, through
fortune's sternest cynicism, just as it seemed entering upon even

more splendid achievement. A star surely rising, as we thought,
has suddenly gone out. A radiantinvention shines no more; the

voice is hushed of a creative mind, expressing its fine imagining
in this, our peerless English tongue. His expression was so

original and fresh from Nature's treasure-house, so prodigal and
various, its too brief flow so consummate through an inborn gift

made perfect by unsparing toil, that mastery of the art by which
Robert Louis Stevenson conveyed those imaginings to us so

picturesque, yet wisely ordered, his own romantic life - and now,
at last, so pathetic a loss which renews

"'The Virgilian cry,
The sense of tears in mortal things,'

that this assemblage has gathered at the first summons, in tribute
to a beautiful genius, and to avow that with the putting out of

that bright intelligence the reading world experiences a more than
wonted grief.

"Judged by the sum of his interrupted work, Stevenson had his
limitations. But the work was adjusted to the scale of a possibly

long career. As it was, the good fairies brought all gifts, save
that of health, to his cradle, and the gift-spoiler wrapped them in

a shroud. Thinking of what his art seemed leading to - for things
that would be the crowning efforts of other men seemed prentice-

work in his case - it was not safe to bound his limitations. And
now it is as if Sir Walter, for example, had died at forty-four,

with the WAVERLEY NOVELS just begun! In originality, in the
conception of action and situation, which, however phantastic, are

seemingly within reason, once we breathe the air of his Fancyland;
in the union of bracing and heroiccharacter and adventure; in all

that belongs to tale-writing pure and simple, his gift was
exhaustless. No other such charmer, in this wise, has appeared in

his generation. We thought the stories, the fairy tales, had all
been told, but 'Once upon a time' meant for him our own time, and

the grave and gay magic of Prince Florizel in dingy London or sunny
France. All this is but one of his provinces, however distinctive.

Besides, how he buttressed his romance with apparent truth! Since
Defoe, none had a better right to say: 'There was one thing I

determined to do when I began this long story, and that was to tell
out everything as it befell.'

"I remember delighting in two fascinating stories of Paris in the
time of Francois Villon, anonymously reprinted by a New York paper

from a London magazine. They had all the quality, all the
distinction, of which I speak. Shortly afterward I met Mr

Stevenson, then in his twenty-ninth year, at a London club, where
we chanced to be the only loungers in an upper room. To my

surprise he opened a conversation - you know there could be nothing
more unexpected than that in London - and thereby I guessed that he

was as much, if not as far, away from home as I was. He asked many
questions concerning 'the States'; in fact, this was but a few

months before he took his steerage passage for our shores. I was
drawn to the young Scotsman at once. He seemed more like a New-

Englander of Holmes's Brahmin caste, who might have come from
Harvard or Yale. But as he grew animated I thought, as others have

thought, and as one would suspect from his name, that he must have
Scandinavian blood in his veins - that he was of the heroic,

restless, strong and tender Viking strain, and certainly from that
day his works and wanderings have not belied the surmise. He told

me that he was the author of that charming book of gipsying in the
Cevennes which just then had gained for him some attentions from

the literary set. But if I had known that he had written those two
stories of sixteenth-century Paris - as I learned afterwards when

they reappeared in the NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS - I would not have bidden
him good-bye as to an 'unfledged comrade,' but would have wished

indeed to 'grapple him to my soul with hooks of steel.'
"Another point is made clear as crystal by his life itself. He had

the instinct, and he had the courage, to make it the servant, and
not the master, of the faculty within him. I say he had the

courage, but so potent was his birth-spell that doubtless he could
not otherwise. Nothing commonplace sufficed him. A regulation

stay-at-home life would have been fatal to his art. The ancient
mandate, 'Follow thy Genius,' was well obeyed. Unshackled freedom

of person and habit was a prerequisite; as an imaginary artist he
felt - nature keeps her poets and story-tellers children to the

last - he felt, if he ever reasoned it out, that he must gang his
own gait, whether it seemed promising, or the reverse, to kith,

kin, or alien. So his wanderings were not only in the most natural
but in the wisest consonance with his creative dreams. Wherever he

went, he found something essential for his use, breathed upon it,
and returned it fourfold in beauty and worth. The longing of the

Norseman for the tropic, of the pine for the palm, took him to the
South Seas. There, too, strange secrets were at once revealed to

him, and every island became an 'Isle of Voices.' Yes, an
additional proof of Stevenson's artisticmission lay in his

careless, careful, liberty of life; in that he was an artist no
less than in his work. He trusted to the impulse which possessed

him - that which so many of us have conscientiously disobeyed and
too late have found ourselves in reputable bondage to

circumstances.
"But those whom you are waiting to hear will speak more fully of

all this - some of them with the interest of their personal
remembrance - with the strength of their affection for the man

beloved by young and old. In the strange and sudden intimacy with
an author's record which death makes sure, we realise how notable

the list of Stevenson's works produced since 1878; more than a
score of books - not fiction alone, but also essays, criticism,

biography, drama, even history, and, as I need not remind you, that
spontaneous poetry which comes only from a true poet. None can

have failed to observe that, having recreated the story of
adventure, he seemed in his later fiction to interfuse a subtler

purpose - the search for character, the analysis of mind and soul.
Just here his summons came. Between the sunrise of one day and the

sunset of the next he exchanged the forest study for the mountain
grave. There, as he had sung his own wish, he lies 'under the wide

and starry sky.' If there was something of his own romance, so
exquisitely capricious, in the life of Robert Louis Stevenson, so,

also, the poetic conditions are satisfied in his death, and in the
choice of his burial-place upon the top of Pala. As for the

splendour of that maturity upon which we counted, now never to be
fulfilled on sea or land, I say - as once before, when the great