hing I would say is, that he was when I knew him--what pretty much
to the end he remained--a youth. His outlook on life was boyishly genial
and free, despite all his sufferings from ill-health--it was the pride of
action, the joy of endurance, the revelry of high spirits, and the sense
of victory that most fascinated him; and his theory of life was to take
pleasure and give pleasure, without calculation or stint--a kind of
boyish grace and bounty never to be overcome or disturbed by outer
accident or change. If he was sometimes haunted with the thought of
changes through changed conditions or circumstances, as my very old
friend, Mr Charles Lowe, has told even of the College days that he was
always supposing things to undergo some sea-change into something else,
if not "into something rich and strange," this was but to add to his
sense of enjoyment, and the power of conferring delight, and the luxuries
of variety, as boys do when they let fancy loose. And this always had,
with him, an individual reference or return. He was thus constantly, and
latterly, half-consciously, trying to interpret himself somehow through
all the things which engaged him, and which he so transmogrified--things
that especially attracted him and took his fancy. Thus, if it must be
confessed, that even in his highest moments, there lingers a touch--if no
more than a touch--of self-consciousness which will not allow him to
forget manner in matter, it is also true that he is cunningly conveying
traits in himself; and the sense of this is often at the root of his
sweet, gentle, naive humour. There is, therefore, some truth in the
criticisms which assert that even "long John Silver," that fine pirate,
with his one leg, was, after all, a shadow of Stevenson himself--the
genial buccaneer who did his tremendous murdering with a smile on his
face was but Stevenson thrown into new circumstances, or, as one has
said, Stevenson-cum-Henley, so thrown as was also Archer in _Weir of
Hermiston_, and more than this, that his most successful women-folk--like
Miss Grant and Catriona--are studies of himself, and that in all his
heroes, and even heroines, was an unmistakable touch of R. L. Stevenson.
Even Mr Baildon rather maladroitly admits that in Miss Grant, the Lord
Advocate's daughter, _there is a good deal of the author himself
disguised in petticoats_. I have thought of Stevenson in many suits,
beside that which included the velvet jacket, but--petticoats!