A pretty little anthology might be made of poems by distinguished writers who never for a moment professed to be poets, and who only "swept, with hurried hand, the strings" when they thought nobody was listening. The elegant technical people of the eighteenth century, who never liked to be too abstruse to seem polite, would contribute a great many of these flowers that were born to bloom unseen. It is not everybody who is aware that the majestic Sir William Blackstone was "guilty," as people put it, of a set of one hundred octosyllabic verses which would do credit to any laurelled master on Parnassus. We might, indeed, open our little volume with The Lawyers Farewell to his Muse. Then, of course, there would be Bishop Berkeley's unique poem, Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way; and Oldys, the antiquary, would spare us his Busy, curious, thirsty Fly. We should appeal to Burton for the prefatory verses in the Anatomy of Melancholy, and to Bacon for The World's Bubble. If I had any finger in that anthology, Smollett's Ode to Leven Water should by no means be omitted. It would be a false pride that would reject Holcroft's Gaffer Gray, or Sydney Smith's Receipt for a Salad, which latter Herrick might have been glad to sign. Hume's solitary poem should be printed by itself, or with some of Carlyle's lyrics, and George Eliot's sonnets, in an appendix, as an awful warning.

As we come down to recent times the task of editing our anthology would grow difficult. In our day, the prose writers have either been coy or copious with their verses. If Professor Tyndall has never essayed the Lydian measure it is very surprising, but we have not yet been admitted to hear his shell; nor has Mr. Walter Besant, to the best of my belief, published an ode to anything. Let the shades of Berkeley and Smollett administer reproof. Until quite lately, however, we should have been contented to close our selection with "The bed was made, the room was fit," from Travels with a Donkey. But Mr. Stevenson is now ineligible—he has published books of poems.

That this departure is not quite a new one might be surmised by any one who has followed closely the publications of the essayist and novelist whom a better man than I am has called "the most exquisite and original of our day." Though Mr. Stevenson's prose volumes are more than twelve in number, and though he had been thought of essentially as a prose writer, the ivory shoulder of the lyre has peeped out now and then. I do not refer to his early collections of verse, to Not I, and other Poems, to Moral Emblems, and to The Graver and the Pen. (I mention these scarce publications of the Davos press in the hope of rousing wicked passions in the breasts of other collectors, since my own set of them is complete.) These volumes were decidedly occult. A man might build upon them a reputation as a sage, but hardly as a poet. Their stern morality came well from one whose mother's milk has been the Shorter Catechism; they are books which no one can read and not be the better for; but as mere verse, they leave something to be desired. Non ragionam di lor, ma guarda, if you happen to be lucky enough to possess them, e passa. Where the careful reader has perceived that Mr. Stevenson was likely to become openly a poet has been in snatches of verse published here and there in periodicals, and of a quality too good to be neglected. Nevertheless, the publication of A Child's Garden of Verses (Longmans, 1885) was something of a surprise, and perhaps the new book of grown-up poems, Underwoods (Chatto and Windus, 1887) is more surprising still. There is no doubt about it any longer. Mr. Stevenson is a candidate for the bays.

The Child's Garden of Verses has now been published long enough to enable us to make a calm consideration of its merits. When it was fresh, opinion was divided, as it always is about a new strong thing, between those who, in Mr. Longfellow's phrase about the little girl, think it very, very good, and those who think it is horrid. After reading the new book, the Underwoods, we come back to A Child's Garden with a clearer sense of the writer's intention, and a wider experience of his poetical outlook upon life. The later book helps us to comprehend the former; there is the same sincerity, the same buoyant simplicity, the same curiously candid and confidential attitude of mind. If any one doubted that Mr. Stevenson was putting his own childish memories into verse in the first book, all doubt must cease in reading the second book, where the experiences, although those of an adult, have exactly the same convincing air of candour. The first thing which struck the reader of A Child's Garden was the extraordinary clearness and precision with which the immature fancies of eager childhood were reproduced in it. People whose own childish memories had become very vague, and whose recollections of their games and dreams were hazy in the extreme, asked themselves how far this poet's visions were inspired by real memory and how far by invention. The new book sets that question at rest; the same hand that gave us—

and the even more delicious—

now gives us pictures like the following:

We now perceive that it is not invention, but memory of an extraordinarily vivid kind, patiently directed to little things, and charged with imagination; and we turn back with increased interest to A Child's Garden, assured that it gives us a unique thing, a transcript of that child-mind which we have all possessed and enjoyed, but of which no one, except Mr. Stevenson, seems to have carried away a photograph. Long ago, in one of the very earliest, if I remember right, of those essays by R. L. S. for which we used so eagerly to watch the Cornhill Magazine in Mr. Leslie Stephen's time, in the paper called "Child Play," this retention of what is wiped off from the memories of the rest of us was clearly displayed. Out of this rarely suggestive essay I will quote a few lines, which might have been printed as an introduction to A Child's Garden:

"In the child's world of dim sensation, play is all in all. 'Making believe' is the gist of his whole life, and he cannot so much as take a walk except in character. I could not learn my alphabet without some suitable mise-en-scÈne, and had to act a business-man in an office before I could sit down to my book.... I remember, as though it were yesterday, the expansion of spirit, the dignity and self-reliance, that came with a pair of mustachios in burnt cork, even when there was none to see. Children are even content to forego what we call the realities, and prefer the shadow to the substance. When they might be speaking intelligently together, they chatter gibberish by the hour, and are quite happy because they are making believe to speak French."

Probably all will admit the truth of this statement of infant fancy, when it is presented to them in this way. But how many of us, in perfect sincerity, not relying upon legends of the nursery, not refreshed by the study of our own children's "make-believe," can say that we clearly recollect the method of it? We shall find that our memories are like a breath upon the glass, like the shape of a broken wave. Nothing is so hopelessly lost, so utterly volatile, as the fancies of our childhood. But Mr. Stevenson, alone amongst us all, appears to have kept daguerreotypes of the whole series of his childish sensations. Except the late Mrs. Ewing, he seems to be without a rival in this branch of memory as applied to literature.

The various attitudes of literary persons to the child are very interesting. There are, for instance, poets like Victor Hugo and Mr. Swinburne who come to admire, who stay to adore, and who do not disdain to throw their purple over any humble article of nursery use. They are so magnificent in their address to infancy, they say so many brilliant and unexpected things, that the mother is almost as much dazzled as she is gratified. We stand round, with our hats off, and admire the poet as much as he admires the child; but we experience no regret when he presently turns away to a discussion of grown-up things. We have an ill-defined notion that he reconnoitres infancy from the outside, and has not taken the pains to reach the secret mind of childhood. It is to be noted, and this is a suspicious circumstance, that Mr. Swinburne and Victor Hugo like the child better the younger it is.

This is charming; but the address is to the mother, is to the grown-up reflective person. To the real student of child-life the baby contains possibilities, but is at present an uninteresting chrysalis. It cannot carry a gun through the forest, behind the sofa-back; it is hardly so useful as a cushion to represent a passenger in a railway-train of inverted chairs.

Still more remote than the dithyrambic poets are those writers about children—and they are legion—who have ever the eye fixed upon morality, and carry the didactic tongue thrust in the cheek of fable. The late Charles Kingsley, who might have made so perfect a book of his Water-Babies, sins notoriously in this respect. The moment a wise child perceives the presence of allegory, or moral instruction, all the charm of a book is gone. Parable is the very antipodes of childish "make-believe," into which the element of ulterior motive or secondary moral meaning never enters for an instant. The secret of the charm of Mrs. Gatty's Parables from Nature, which were the fairest food given to very young minds in my day, was that the fortunate child never discovered that they were parables at all. I, for one, used to read and re-read them as realistic statements of fact, the necessity of pointing a moral merely having driven the amiable author to the making of her story a little more fantastic, and therefore more welcome, than it would otherwise be. It was explained to me one hapless day that the parables were of a nature to instil nice principles into the mind; and from that moment Mrs. Gatty became a broken idol. Lewis Carroll owed his great and deserved success to his suppleness in bending his fancy to the conditions of a mind that is dreaming. It has never seemed to me that the Adventures in Wonderland were specially childish; dreams are much the same, whether a child or a man is passive under them, and it is a fact that Lewis Carroll appeals just as keenly to adults as to children. In Edward Lear's rhymes and ballads the love of grotesque nonsense in the grown-up child is mainly appealed to; and these are certainly appreciated more by parents than by children.

It would be easy, by multiplying examples, to drive home my contention that only two out of the very numerous authors who have written successfully on or for children have shown a clear recollection of the mind of healthy childhood itself. Many authors have achieved brilliant success in describing children, in verbally caressing them, in amusing, in instructing them; but only two, Mrs. Ewing in prose, and Mr. Stevenson in verse, have sat down with them without disturbing their fancies, and have looked into the world of "make-believe" with the children's own eyes. If Victor Hugo should visit the nursery, every head of hair ought to be brushed, every pinafore be clean, and nurse must certainly be present, as well as mamma. But Mrs. Ewing or Mr. Stevenson might lead a long romp in the attic when nurse was out shopping, and not a child in the house should know that a grown-up person had been there. There are at least a dozen pieces in the Child's Garden which might be quoted to show what is meant. "The Lamplighter" will serve our purpose as well as any other:

In publishing this autumn a second volume, this time of grown-up verses, Mr. Stevenson has ventured on a bolder experiment. His Underwoods, with its title openly borrowed from Ben Jonson, is an easy book to appreciate and enjoy, but not to review. In many respects it is plainly the work of the same fancy that described the Country of Counterpane and the Land of Story-books, but it has grown a little sadder, and a great deal older. There is the same delicate sincerity, the same candour and simplicity, the same artless dependence on the good faith of the public. The ordinary themes of the poets are untouched; there is not one piece from cover to cover which deals with the passion of love. The book is occupied with friendship, with nature, with the honourable instincts of man's moral machinery. Above all, it enters with great minuteness, and in a very confidential spirit, into the theories and moods of the writer himself. It will be to many readers a revelation of the every-day life of an author whose impersonal writings have given them so much and so varied pleasure. Not a dozen ordinary interviewers could have extracted so much of the character of the man himself as he gives us in these one hundred and twenty pages.

The question of admitting the personal element into literature is one which is not very clearly understood. People try to make rules about it, and say that an author may describe his study, but not his dining-room, and his wife, but not her cousin. The fact is that no rules can possibly be laid down in a matter which is one of individual sympathy. The discussion whether a writer may speak of himself or no is utterly vain until we are informed in what voice he has the habit of speaking. It is all a question which depends on the timbre of the literary voice. As in life there are persons whose sweetness of utterance is such that we love to have them warbling at our side, no matter on what subject they speak, and others to whom we have scarcely patience to listen if they want to tell us that we have inherited a fortune, so it is in literature. Except that little class of stoic critics who like to take their books in vacuo, most of us prefer to know something about the authors we read. But whether we like them to tell it us themselves, or no, depends entirely on the voice. Thackeray and Fielding are never confidential enough to satisfy us; Dickens and Smollett set our teeth on edge directly they start upon a career of confidential expansion; and this has nothing to do with any preference for Tom Jones over Peregrine Pickle. There is no doubt that Mr. Stevenson is one of those writers the sound of whose personal voices is pleasing to the public, and there must be hundreds of his admirers who will not miss one word of "To a Gardener" or "The Mirror Speaks," and who will puzzle out each of the intimate addresses to his private friends with complete satisfaction.

The present writer is one of those who are most under the spell. For me Mr. Stevenson may speak for ever, and chronicle at full length all his uncles and his cousins and his nurses. But I think if it were my privilege to serve him in the capacity of MoliÈre's old woman, or to be what a friend of mine would call his "foolometer," I should pluck up courage to represent to him that this thing can be overdone. I openly avow myself an enthusiast, yet even I shrink before the confidential character of the prose inscription to Underwoods. This volume is dedicated, if you please, to eleven physicians, and it is strange that one so all compact of humour as Mr. Stevenson should not have noticed how funny it is to think of an author seated affably in an armchair, simultaneously summoning by name eleven physicians to take a few words of praise each, and a copy of his little book.

The objective side of Mr. Stevenson's mind is very rich and full, and he has no need to retire too obstinately upon the subjective. Yet I know not that anything he has written in verse is more worthily dignified than the following little personal fragment, in which he refers, of course, to the grandfather who died a few weeks before his birth, and to the father whom he had just conducted to the grave, both heroic builders of lighthouses:

This is a particularly happy specimen of Mr. Stevenson's blank verse, in which metre, as a rule, he does not show to advantage. It is not that his verses are ever lame or faulty, for in the technical portion of the art he seldom fails, but that his rhymeless iambics remind the ear too much now of Tennyson, now of Keats. He is, on the contrary, exceedingly happy and very much himself in that metre of eight or seven syllables, with couplet-rhymes, which served so well the first poets who broke away from heroic verse, such as Swift and Lady Winchilsea, Green and Dyer. If he must be affiliated to any school of poets it is to these, who hold the first outworks between the old classical camp and the invading army of romance, to whom I should ally him. Martial is with those octo-syllabists of Queen Anne, and to Martial might well have been assigned, had they been in old Latin, the delicately homely lines, "To a Gardener." How felicitous is this quatrain about the onion—

Or this, in more irregular measure, and enfolding a loftier fancy—

It would be arrogant in the extreme to decide whether or no Mr. R. L. Stevenson's poems will be read in the future. They are, however, so full of character, so redolent of his own fascinating temperament, that it is not too bold to suppose that so long as his prose is appreciated those who love that will turn to this. There have been prose writers whose verse has not lacked accomplishment or merit, but has been so far from interpreting their prose that it rather disturbed its effect and weakened its influence. Cowley is an example of this, whose ingenious and dryly intellectual poetry positively terrifies the reader away from his eminently suave and human essays. Neither of Mr. Stevenson's volumes of poetry will thus disturb his prose. Opinions may be divided as to their positive value, but no one will doubt that the same characteristics are displayed in the poems, the same suspicion of "the abhorred pedantic sanhedrim," the same fulness of life and tenderness of hope, the same bright felicity of epithet as in the essays and romances. The belief, however, may be expressed without fear of contradiction that Mr. Stevenson's fame will rest mainly upon his verse and not upon his prose, only in that dim future when Mr. Matthew Arnold's prophecy shall be fulfilled and Shelley's letters shall be preferred to his lyrical poems. It is saying a great deal to acknowledge that the author of Kidnapped is scarcely less readable in verse than he is in prose.

1887.