of human language. The style, the manner, would be the man, not in his unreasoned and really uncharacteristic caprices, involuntary or affected, but in absolutely sincere apprehension of what is most real to him. But let us hear our French guide again.

takes rank as the typically perfect art. If music be the ideal of all art whatever, precisely because in music it is impossible. to distinguish the form from the substance 5 or matter, the subject from the expression, then, literature, by finding its specific excellence in the absolute correspondence Styles,' says Flaubert's commentator, of the term to its import, will be but ful'Styles, as so many peculiar molds, each filling the condition of all artistic quality of which bears the mark of a particular 10 in things everywhere, of all good art. writer, who is to pour into it the whole content of his ideas, were no part of his theory. What he believed in was Style: that is to say, a certain absolute and unique manner of expressing a thing, in 15 all its intensity and color. For him the form was the work itself. As in living creatures, the blood, nourishing the body, determines its very contour and external aspect, just so, to his mind, the matter, 20 the basis, in a work of art, imposed necessarily, the unique, the just expression, the measure, the rhythm- the form in all its characteristics.'

If the style be the man, in all the color 25 and intensity of a veritable apprehension, it will be in a real sense impersonal.'

I said, thinking of books like Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, that prose literature was the characteristic art of the 30 nineteenth century, as others, thinking of its triumphs since the youth of Bach, have assigned that place to music. Music and prose literature are, in one sense, the opposite terms of art; the art of literature 35 presenting to the imagination, through the intelligence, a range of interests, as free and various as those which music presents to it through sense. And cer

Good art, but not necessarily great art; the distinction between great art and good art depending immediately, as regards literature at all events, not on its form, but on the matter. Thackeray's Esmond, surely, is greater art than Vanity Fair, by the greater dignity of its interests. It is on the quality of the matter it informs or controls, its compass, its variety, its alliance to great ends, or the depth of the note of revolt, or the largeness of hope in it, that the greatness of literary art depends, as The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Les Misérables, The English Bible, are great art. Given the conditions I have tried to explain as constituting good art; then, if it be devoted further to the increase of men's happiness, to the redemption of the oppressed, or the enlargement of our sympathies with each other, or to such presentment of new or old truth about ourselves and our relation to the world as may ennoble and fortify us in our sojourn here, or immediately, as with Dante, to the glory of God, it will be also great art; if, over and above those qualities I summed up as mind and soul

that color and mystic perfume, and that reasonable structure, it has something of

tainly the tendency of what has been here 40 the soul of humanity in it, and finds its

said is to bring literature too under those conditions, by conformity to which music

logical, its architectural place, in the great structure of human life.

(1888)

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1850-1894).

Stevenson's great-grandfather, grandfather, and father were engineers to the Board of Northern Lighthouses, and he was educated for the family profession. At twenty-one he asked to be allowed to give up engineering for literature, and his father consented on condition that he qualified for the Scottish Bar. Stevenson fulfilled the condition, but took as little interest in his legal as in his engineering studies, setting far more store by certain other odds and ends that he came by in the open street while he was playing truant.' At his chosen pursuit of literature, however, he toiled incessantly. He says: 'I imagine nobody had ever such pains to learn a trade as I had; but I slogged at it day in and day out; and I frankly believe (thanks to my dire industry) I have done more with smaller gifts than almost any man of letters in the world.' As a schoolboy he edited magazines and wrote essays, stories and plays; his first novel was turned into a historical essay and privately printed when he was sixteen. As an undergraduate at Edinburgh he established the University Magazine which ran four months in undisturbed obscurity and died without a gasp.' In 1873-4 he had half-a-dozen articles in various magazines, and his first book, An Inland Voyage, was published in 1878. It is an account of a canoe trip in Belgium and France made two years earlier. About this time Stevenson met and fell in love with Mrs. Fanny Osbourne, an American lady who came to study art in France. In 1878 she returned to California, and thither in 1879 Stevenson followed her. Some of his experiences in crossing the Atlantic and the American continent (though by no means all the sufferings he endured) are told in The Amateur Emigrant and Across the Plains. He arrived at San Francisco in desperate straits of health and pocket, and only Mrs. Osbourne's devoted nursing saved his life. After his recovery, they were married, and spent their honeymoon in the neighboring mountains, described in The Silverado Squatters. His first volume of essays, Virginibus Puerisque, was highly appreciated, but only by a few: it was a book for boys, Treasure Island, which made him suddenly famous. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Kidnapped were equally successful. During these years he was living in various health resorts in Europe and America; in 1888 he went for a long voyage in the Pacific, at the end of which he bought an estate and settled in Samoa. He endeared himself to the natives, and in spite of continued illness, did some of his best literary work. The year before his death he wrote: For fourteen years I have not had a day's real health; I have wakened sick and gone to bed weary; and I have done my work unflinchingly. I have written in bed, and written out of it, written in hemorrhages, written in sickness, written torn by coughing, written when my hand swam for weakness; and for so long, it seems to me I have won my wager and recovered my glove. I am better now, have been, rightly speaking, since first I came to the Pacific; and still, few are the days when I am not in some physical distress. And the battle goes on ill or well, is a trifle: so as it goes. I was made for a contest, and the Powers have so willed that my battlefield should be this dingy, inglorious one of the bed and the physic bottle.' He was buried at the top of the mountain overlooking his Samoan home in a tomb inscribed with his own Requiem:

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

wrong direction. Yet surely his complaint is grounded; surely the speech of Englishmen is too often lacking in generous ardor, the better part of the man too 5 often withheld from the social commerce, and the contact of mind with mind evaded as with terror. A Scotch peasant will talk more liberally out of his own experience. He will not put you by with

One thing especially continues unfamiliar to the Scotchman's eye- the domestic architecture, the look of streets and buildings; the quaint, venerable age of many, and the thin walls and warm coloring of all. We have, in Scotland, far fewer ancient buildings, above all in country places; and those that we have are all of hewn or harled masonry. Wood has been sparingly used in their 10 conversational counters and small jests;

the window-frames

are

15

construction; sunken in the wall, not flat to the front, as in England; the roofs are steeperpitched; even a hill farm will have a massy, square, cold, and permanent appearance. English houses, in comparison, have the look of cardboard toys, such as a puff might shatter. And to this the Scotchman never becomes used. His eye can never rest consciously on one of these 20 brick houses-rickles of brick, as he one of these might call them — or on flat-chested streets, but he is instantly reminded where he is, and instantly travels back in fancy to his home.

he will give you the best of himself, like one interested in life and man's chief end. A Scotchman is vain, interested in himself and others, eager for sympathy, setting forth his thoughts and experience in the best light. The egoism of the Englishman is self-contained. He does not seek to proselytize. He takes no interest in Scotland or the Scotch, and, what is the unkindest cut of all, he does not care to justify his indifference. Give him the wages of going on and being an Englishman, that is all he asks; and in the meantime, while you continue to This is no 25 associate, he would rather not be reminded of your baser origin. Compared with the grand, tree-like self-sufficiency of his demeanor, the vanity and curiosity of the Scot seem uneasy, vulgar, and immodest. That you should continually try to establish human and serious relations, that you should actually feel an interest in John Bull, and desire and invite a return of interest from him, may argue something more awake and lively in your mind, but it still puts you in the attitude of a suitor and a poor relation. Thus even the lowest class of the educated English towers over a Scotchman by the head and shoulders.

30

my ain house; I ken by the biggin' o't.'
And yet perhaps it is his own, bought
with his own money, the key of it long
polished in his pocket; but it has not yet,
and never will be, thoroughly adopted by
his imagination; nor does he cease to re-
member that, in the whole length and
breadth of his native country, there was
no building even distantly resembling it.
But it is not alone in scenery and 35
architecture that we count England for-
eign. The constitution of society, the
very pillars of the empire, surprise and
The dull, neglected peas-
even pain us.
ant, sunk in matter, insolent, gross, 40
and servile, makes a startling contrast
with our own long-legged, long-headed,
thoughtful, Bible-quoting plowman. A
place as Suffolk
week or two in such a
leaves the Scotchman gasping. It seems 45
incredible that within the boundaries of
his own island a class should have been
thus forgotten. Even the educated and
intelligent, who hold our own opinions
and speak in our own words, yet seem 50
to hold them with a difference or from
another reason, and to speak on all things
with less interest and conviction.
first shock of English society is like a
cold plunge. It is possible that the Scot 55
comes looking for too much, and to be
sure his first experiment will be in the

The

Different indeed is the atmosphere in which Scotch and English youth begin to look about them, come to themselves in life, and gather up those first apprehensions which are the material of future thought and, to a great extent, the rule of future conduct. I have been to school in both countries, and I found, in the boys of the North, something at once rougher and more tender, at once more reserve and more expansion, a greater habitual distance checkered by glimpses of a nearer intimacy, and on the whole wider extremes of temperament and sensibility. The boy of the South seems more wholesome, but less thoughtful; he gives himself to games as to a business, striving to

one

15

25

excel, but is not readily transported by
imagination; the type remains with me as
cleaner in mind and body, more active,
fonder of eating, endowed with a lesser
and a less romantic sense of life and of 5
the future, and more immersed in present
circumstances. And certainly, for
thing, English boys are younger for their
age. Sabbath observance make a series
of grim, and perhaps serviceable, pauses 10
in the tenor of Scotch boyhood-days
of great stillness and solitude for the re-
bellious mind, when in the dearth of
books and play, and in the intervals of
studying the Shorter Catechism, the intel-
lect and senses prey upon and test each
other. The typical English Sunday, with
the huge midday dinner and the plethoric
afternoon, leads perhaps to different re-
sults. About the very cradle of the Scot 20
there goes a hum of metaphysical di-
vinity; and the whole of two divergent
systems is summed up, not merely spe-
ciously, in the two first questions of the
rival catechisms, the English tritely in-
quiring, 'What is your name?' the Scot-
tish striking at the very roots of life with,
'What is the chief end of man?' and an-
swering nobly, if obscurely, 'To glorify
God and to enjoy Him forever.' I do 30
not wish to make an idol of the Shorter
Catechism; but the fact of such a ques-
tion being asked opens to us Scotch a
great field of speculation; and the fact
that it is asked of all of us, from the peer 35
to the plowboy, binds us more nearly
together. No Englishman of Byron's
age, character, and history, would have
had patience for long theological discus-
sions on the way to fight for Greece;
but the daft Gordon blood and the Aber-
donian schooldays kept their influence to
the end. We have spoken of the material
conditions; nor need much more be said
of these of the land lying everywhere 45
more exposed, of the wind always louder
and bleaker, of the black, roaring win-
ters, of the gloom of high-lying, old stone
cities, imminent on the windy seaboard;
compared with the level streets, the warm
coloring of the brick, the domestic quaint-
ness of the architecture, among which
English children begin to grow up and
come to themselves in life. As the stage
of the university approaches, the con- 55
trast becomes more express. The English
lad goes to Oxford or Cambridge; there,

4~

50

in an ideal world of gardens, to lead a semi-scenic life, costumed, disciplined, and drilled by proctors. Nor is this to be regarded merely as a stage of education; it is a piece of privilege besides, and a step that separates him further from the bulk of his compatriots. At an earlier age the Scottish lad begins his greatly different experience of crowded classrooms, of a gaunt quadrangle, of a bell hourly booming over the traffic of the city to recall him from the public-house where he has been lunching, or the streets where he has been wandering fancy-free. His college life has little of restraint, and nothing of necessary gentility. He will find no quiet clique of the exclusive, studious, and cultured; no rotten borough of the arts. All classes rub shoulders on the greasy benches. The raffish young gentleman in gloves must measure his scholarship with the plain, clownish laddie from the parish school. They separate, at the session's end, onc to smoke cigars about a watering-place, the other to resume the labors of the field beside his peasant family. The first muster of a college class in Scotland is a scene of curious and painful interest; so many lads, fresh from the heather, hang round the stove in cloddish embarrassment, ruffled by the presence of their smarter comrades, and afraid of the sound of their own rustic voices. It was in these early days, I think, that Professor Blackie won the affection of his pupils, putting these uncouth, umbrageous students at their ease with ready human geniality. Thus, at least, we have a healthy democratic atmosphere to breathe in while at work; even when there is no cordiality there is always a juxtaposition of the different classes, and in the competition of study the intellectual power of each is plainly demonstrated to the other. Our tasks ended, we of the North go forth as freemen into the humming, lamplit city. At five o'clock you may see the last of us hiving from the college gates, in the glare of the shop windows, under the green glimmer of the winter sunset. The frost tingles in our blood; no proctor lies in wait to intercept us; till the bell sounds again, we are the masters of the world; and some portion of our lives is always Saturday, la trêve de Dieu [the truce of God].

5

Highlander wore a different

costume,

spoke a different language, worshipped in another church, held different morals, and obeyed a different social constitution from his fellow-countrymen either of the South or North. Even the English, it is recorded, did not loathe the Highlander and the Highland costume as they were loathed by the remainder of the Scotch.

Nor must we omit the sense of the nature of his country and his country's history gradually growing in the child's mind from story and from observation. A Scottish child hears much of shipwreck, outlying iron skerries, pitiless breakers, and great sea-lights; much of heathery mountains, wild clans, and hunted Covenanters. Breaths come to him in song of the distant Cheviots and 10 Yet the Highlander felt himself a Scot. the ring of foraying hoofs. He glories in his hard-fisted forefathers, of the iron girdle and the handful of oatmeal, who rode so swiftly and lived so sparely on their raids. Poverty, ill-luck, enterprise, and constant resolution are the fibers of the legend of his country's history. The heroes and kings of Scotland have been tragically fated; the most marking incidents in Scottish history-Flodden, 20 Darien, or the Forty-five were still

He would willingly raid into the Scotch lowlands; but his courage failed him at the border, and he regarded England as a perilous, unhomely land. When the 15 Black Watch, after years of foreign service, returned to Scotland, veterans leaped out and kissed the earth at Port Patrick. They had been in Ireland, stationed among men of their own race and language, where they were well liked and treated with affection; but it was the soil of Galloway that they kissed at the extreme end of the hostile lowlands, among a people who did not understand their speech, and who had hated, harried, and hanged them since the dawn of history. Last, and perhaps most curious, the sons of chieftans were often educated on the continent of Europe. They went

either failures or defeats; and the fall of Wallace and the repeated reverses of the Bruce combine with the very smallness of the country to teach rather a 25 moral than a material criterion for life. Britain is altogether small, the mere taproot of her extended empire; Scotland, again, which alone the Scottish boy adopts in his imagination, is but a little 30 abroad speaking Gaelic; they returned

a mere

part of that, and avowedly cold, sterile,
and unpopulous. It is not so for noth-
ing. I once seemed to have perceived
in an American boy a greater readiness
of sympathy for lands that are great, and 35
rich, and growing, like his
It
proved to be quite otherwise:
dumb piece of boyish romance, that I
had lacked penetration to divine. But the
error serves the purpose of my argument;
for I am sure, at least, that the heart of
young Scotland will be always touched
more nearly by paucity of number and
Spartan poverty of life.

40

So we may argue, and yet the differ- 45 ence is not explained. That Shorter Catechism which I took as being so typical of Scotland, was yet composed in the city of Westminster. The division of races is more sharply marked within 50 the borders of Scotland itself than bethe countries. Galloway and tween Buchan, Lothian and Lochaber, are like foreign parts; yet you may choose a man from any of them, and, ten to one, he 55 shall prove to have the headmark of a Scot. A century and a half ago the

speaking, not English, but the broad dialect of Scotland. Now, what idea had they in their minds when they thus, in thought, identified themselves with their ancestral enemies? What was the sense in which they were Scotch and not English, or Scotch and not Irish? Can a bare name be thus influential on the minds and affections of men, and a political aggregation blind them to the nature of facts? The story of the Austrian Empire would seem to answer, No; the far more galling business of Ireland clenches the negative from nearer home. Is it common education, common morals, a common language, or a common faith, that joins men into nations? There were practically none of these in the case we are considering.

The fact remains: in spite of the dif-
ference of blood and language, the Low-
lander feels himself the sentimental
countryman of the Highlander. When
they meet abroad, they fall upon
other's necks
each
in spirit;
spirit; even
kind of clannish
But from his

at home there is a
intimacy in their talk.