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artist, and has received the sanction of precedent. But if it is hopeless to overthrow this rule, there are at least other matters which we are free to examine. It is so inexpedient as to be almost criminal to reprint in hot haste as a permanent book the light utterances of our momens perdus, the popular article, or still more popular speech; and it is still worse to dilute and cut a subject in which the capricious taste of the public has chosen to find a special temporary interest in order to make more of it. This last is an expedient which should be approved or practised by no man of letters worthy the name.

We are disposed to reproach Mr. Louis Stevenson1 for following a bad example in this way. He is still too young, and has too much original power and force of invention, to begin to serve up réchauffés of his magazine stories at this period of his career. If our young authors would but realise this law of honour, what a good thing it would be both for themselves and their readers! We have never joined the general cry against continuous work in the way of literary production; nor have we ever been able to see why books should be the only creations of art which are to be stopped on the way by fictitious rules as to the length of time necessary for their incubation. The literary workman, while his mind is in full career with all the impulse and force of life, and his wits quickened by exercise, is, we think, as capable of continuous production as any artist can be. He is strengthened, not weakened, by the mere force of doing; his faculties are keener to perceive; his imagination is more apt to strike out new complications, new combinations, while it is in full

employment. Sparks do not rise from a cold anvil, nor is thread spun straight and fine from an unaccustomed wheel. There are writers who scamp their work, who write without a vocation, to whom their craft is neither a glory nor a joy, but a mechanical occupation; but it is not of such that we speak. To every man who is in the constant exercise of his work, work is easier, and, we venture to say, in most cases work is better done, than when he is working half time, or hindered in the habitual exercise of his craft. And we think it an impertinence to say that this law does not apply to the literary worker. He, indeed, might have a right to claim more than any other the privilege of his craft, the advantage of that strain of feeling and faculty which cannot be turned off and on like the supplies of a water company, but flows naturally and continuously, unless dammed and obstructed by external obstacles. The writer of fiction knows how often one train of imaginary circumstances springs naturally out of another, and how the world widens and expands into ever new scenes of human life, suggested by that upon which he is working, or leading out of it, by a succession as infallible as any other kind of growth and development. To stop the current arbitrarily, or to blame him for following it with the ardour and rapidity of artistic interest and impulse, is one of the foolish things which literary criticism takes upon itself to do, as if the principles of literary production were different from those of all other works of art. But it is not so; and except in cases of peculiar temperament or habit, the workman who is in full tide of work is he who works the

1 The Merry Men. By Robert Louis Stevenson.

best, as in every other craft under We are not sure now whether the heaven. Therefore let the man work: let him go on to fresh woods and pastures new; let him exercise his gifts, and snatch his stories from the storehouse, ever full, of active genius and thought. It will be time enough when the tide grows fainter, when he no longer finds the invention he requires, or is able to protect himself into the perpetually changing circumstances of the life about him-it will be time enough then to gather up his basket of fragments, to pick up what he has dropped by the highways and hedges in the force of his early career.

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We may reconsider our judgment, however, in Mr Stevenson's case, from the fact that, so far as we are aware, the Merry Men,' which is the first of these collected stories, is new, and has never been published before. It is a curious and weird story, with many things in it which remind us of Mr Stevenson's best work, and much of the Highland atmosphere, and salt sniff of the fresh, cold, boisterous air which recall Kidnapped,' a book in which there were many excellences. It is somewhat curious that the author of those dainty little essays, which first won distinction for Mr Stevenson's name, which were almost too finely drawn for ordinary flesh and blood, should have had the good fortune just when it was necessary-when the English reader had begun to show signs of his present turn of taste, and desire for adventure and story in preference to sentiment and reflection-to open the new vein of wonder, and imaginative horror and mystery, which has made him one of the leaders of this revolution. Nothing could have been more well-timed, and few things, from the point of view of Mr Stevenson's early work, more unlikely.

fine thread of humour which runs through most of his stories, and which goes the length of the most delightful absurdity in some, is not rather a puzzling than an attractive ingredient to the readers, who find quite sufficient play of pleasantry in Captain Good's teeth and eyeglass, and prefer the exaggeration of apparently mathematical fact in 'King Solomon's Mines' to the more subtle and exquisite extravagance and grim fun of Treasure Island' and the 'Suicide Club.' There is no fun in the Merry Men,' who are no mirthful human company, but a wild family of breakers, off the coast of a Highland isle, where grim shipwrecks take place, to the horrible accompaniment of the roar and deafening laughter of these awful vassals of the storm. The master of the wild homestead on Aros, a kind of peninsula, sometimes made into a separate islet by the sea, and exposed to every wind that blows an austerely religious, melancholy, and disappointed man, who is driven mad by a wreck and the horrible chance of gain thus held out to him, gain which, in his frenzy of passionate covetousness, he secures by murder

is the chief figure in the story, which is told by a young relation, who has his own private romance and dream of finding one of the lost ships of the Armada, with all its wealth, under the waters of the bay. This hope, however, fades entirely before the madness of remorse and horror in the elder man, and the strange events which deepen and strengthen it. However even this grim figure is subordinate to the intense influence and force of the scene.

"On all this part of the coast, and especially near Aros, those great granite rocks that I have spoken of go down together in troops into the

sea, like cattle on a summer's day. There they stand, for all the world like their neighbours ashore: only the salt water sobbing between them instead of the quiet earth, and dots of sea-pinks blooming on their sides instead of heather. On calm days you can go wandering between them in a boat for hours, echoes following you about the labyrinth; but when the sea is up, heaven help the man that hears that caldron boiling! Off the south-west end of Aros these blocks are very many, and much greater in size. Indeed they must grow monstrously bigger out to sea, for there must be ten sea miles of open water sown with them as thick as a country place with houses, some standing thirty feet above the tides, some covered, but all perilous to ships. So that on a clear westerlyblowing day I have counted from the top of Aros the great rollers breaking white and heavy over as many as sixand-forty buried reefs. But it is nearer in-shore that the danger is worst; for the tide here, running like a mill-race, makes a long belt of broken water-a Roost we call it at the tail of the land. I have often been out there in a dead calm at the slack of the tide; and a strange place it is, with the sea swirling and creeping up and boiling like the caldrons of a linn, and now and again a little dancing mutter of sound, as though the Roost was talking to itself. But when the tide begins to run again, and above all in heavy weather, there is no man could take a boat within half a mile of it, nor a ship afloat that could either steer or live in such a place. You can hear the roaring of it six miles away. At the seaward end there comes the strongest of the bubble; and it's here that these big breakers dance together the dance of death it may be called-that have got the name in these parts of the Merry Men. I have heard it said that they run fifty feet high, but that must be the green water only, for the spray runs twice as high as that. Whether they got their name from their movements, which are swift and antic, or from the shouting they make about the turn of the tide, so that all Aros shakes with it, is more than I can tell."

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Mr Stevenson has taken the opportunity afforded by this volume of reprinting the very curious sketch called "Will of the Mill," one of the earliest of his productions if we are not mistaken-a singular performance done in neutral tones, and of the kind which certainly is caviare to the general, whatever impression it may make upon better qualified judges. The quietism with which he began, and the strain after effects too fine, and sentiments too ethereal for ordinary humanity, which were the highest fashion at that time, comes strangely upon us with a sense of antiquity, not at all justified by the mere tale of years. Mr Stevenson himself, however, has travelled so very far from these early experiments that we need not hesitate to remark upon the extraordinary effect of remoteness and fictitious antiquity which is in this curious and tentative piece of work, in which the artist's hand shows like that of Corot or of Mason, in twilight effects and dim, far-stretching distances, with nothing defined in the landscape or comprehensible in the morale, which, notwithstanding, is full of delicate and bewildering suggestions. The dim and doubtful picture becomes more bewildering than ever when we think of it as executed by the same hand which has since then produced the

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amazing history of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,' besides many other more legitimate and as thrilling dramas. Even at this advanced period of time, Mr Stevenson does not quite seem to know what he is going permanently to be at. The stories in this book are curiously mixed: they belong to all his styles, and they are interesting to the critic as the somewhat fantastic patterns and "swatches" of a very independent literary hand always are -with the one exception, however, of "Olalla," which has all Mr Stevenson's faults with very few of his merits, and is not at all worthy either of him or of his reputation. But once more we must enter our protest against these baskets of fragments. Let the feast be over at least before these scraps of a banquet are put forth upon the literary table, as if they were the freshest and most nourishing fare.

We think it is M. Alphonse Karr who says somewhere that a lady who writes commits a double fault, in increasing the number of books and diminishing the number of women. We are not aware what effect Mrs Main's literary efforts may have upon herself or upon her sex taken as a whole, but we certainly pronounce her guilty of having wilfully added to the already too great number of books without adequate cause or justification. It seems to be now the accepted the ory that many persons venturing out of her Majesty's dominions, even without extending their travels to the very moderate distance which forms the standard of the Travellers' Club, is entitled to inflict upon the public a detailed account of his or her experiences. This craze for communicating personal details is

to be found in a mild form among the mere sojourners in towns and cities; but it apparently rises to acute mania among those who be. long to what Mrs Main calls "climbing circles." We should be very sorry that the world in general should not have the opportunity of reading such books as Mr Whymper's Scrambles among the Alps'; but we think an enlightened censorship of the press, which would restrict this class of literature (as indeed many other classes) to so many volumes a-year, would confer a benefit upon society. Perhaps it was some such thought which induced Mrs Main to veil her purpose of relating her Alpine experiences under an incomprehensible title. High Life; or, Towers of Silence,' may be taken to mean anything under the sun or above it; our first thoughts, indeed, were of an essay on the House of Lords.

Mrs Main complains that the uninitiated reader of Alpine books delights chiefly in accidents. If so, he will not be interested in the wanderings of our author, who, in most cases, comes off successfully, or at any rate with safety to life or limb. Indeed we confess to feeling that something is wanting in a book where not a guide, not even a porter, is in any way injured. There is, it is true, an English gentleman who nearly faints on a glacier under trying circumstances in the dead of night, and we freely admit that this is something, but as Mr Boffin would say, "It ain't much." Otherwise, beyond some harmless avalanches, we have nothing more serious than the loss of a guide's ice-axe. Main, to be sure, does not always succeed in her scrambles: but

Mrs

1 High Life; or, Towers of Silence. By the author of The High Alps in Winter; or, Mountaineering in Search of Health.' London: Sampson Low.

futile attempts at ascents do not appeal to our feelings; it seems to us that we could fail to go up a mountain ourselves. the same time, heaven forbid that we should not acknowledge the genuineness of the dangers so boldly faced by Mrs Main; rather would we jump three of Mr Rider Haggard's chasms than follow that intrepid lady up the Dent du Géant. One of the most interesting of these tales of peril is her attempt to cross the Stelvio in a time of heavy snow, which leads to some amusing and some thrilling incidents; but the stories of her various adventures are somewhat lengthy. Nor can we find very much amusement in the sketches of English and American travellers with which the book is filled up. Some of the Swiss-English, however, is amusing; and we have a deep respect for the porter who, being questioned in his examination as to how he would treat a traveller who wanted to rest on a glacier when cold and tired, and would not listen to advice, answered succinctly that he would beat him. Mrs Main appears to be well up in Alpine literature, and brings in little commendatory notices of other people's works with some skill; but surely there must be some mistake when she speaks of Dr Emile Zsigmondy's dangers des Montaignes.' We only know of one Montaigne, whom we have never found dangerous, but rather soothing. Perhaps, however, there are others of a fiercer kind.

At a moment when the very name of Ireland is explosive, and the difficulties of her management, which have gone on growing for so many centuries, seem to have come at last to a climax, it is curious to light upon a book on this subject which has nothing to

do with politics, but much with those practical questions on which the prosperity of nations and individuals chiefly depend. Everything in Ireland, unfortunately, has given way to politics; and she is perhaps the one country remaining in the world in which people not altogether devoid of reason are still capable of persuading themselves that revolution means wellbeing, and that prosperity is to be attained through the action of Parliament. Notwithstanding all the injustice towards it with which we are credited, the great qualities of the Irish race have always had recognition at least in literature. That great gift of purity which is its admirable distinction has been dwelt upon by alien tongues and pens more than by those native to the country; and nobody has been able to ignore the proverbial wit and fun and fancy, probably much greater in the report than in reality, which for the last hundred years at least English writers have vied with each other in celebrating.

"For fun, and frolic, and all that, In the wide world was not the match of Pat."

says Sir Walter in the Search for Happiness which his melancholy Sultan set forth upon in the beginning of the century. It seems only just, however, to recognise at the same time those other qualities which are as characteristic of the race. Hatred, violence, and contention did not come into the Island of Saints with the Saxon invader and his detested rule. Count de Montalembert, whose sympathies were all with Ireland, though his French clearsightedness would not allow him to delude himself as to his disappointment in O'Connell and conviction that the Liberator was

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