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 effect of them is large. Chekhov is a Russian classic, yet doubtless, as Prince Mirsky says, a classic of the Silver Age.

He is not to be described as an imposing elemental force. He is not a huge, originating, crushing and dominating mind. He hardly cared to be that. Between 1885 and 1904—a relatively languid generation, spiritually, between the liberalism of the '60s and the incipient Bolshevism that followed the Japanese War—Chekhov made for himself a personal ideal of sensible, sensitive civility. As an artist he sought to reflect Russian life from the point of view of a sensible, sensitive intellectual. His purpose, one may say, was to make readers see and feel the contemporary spectacle as such a man sees and feels it. He stands, then, for culture as contrasted with passion, ethical urgency, and yeasty fermentation. In respect to mood and temper, he stands in relation to Tolstoy as Matthew Arnold stands in relation to Carlyle, or Renan in relation to Victor Hugo, or, say, Mr. Santayana in relation to Royce and James.

Now the fact that Chekhov is coming into English-speaking lands twenty years after his death and is finding sympathetic and intelligent friends among the disenchanted writers of the post-war period, may greatly help us not only to see where his force lies, but also to enter more sympathetically into the minds of contemporary writers of our own time whom ruddy purposeful persons are prone to dismiss as unprofitable pessimists, dilettantes, futilitarians, belittlers of all that is venerable and august. I am thinking now of the vogue enjoyed by the Stracheyan biography, the Beerbohmian caricature, the fiction of Rose Macaulay, the Aldous Huxleyan "novel" and tale, and our in

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 elegant and somewhat brutalized American version of the same Zeitgeist, which we may perhaps summarily designate as Menckenism.

Prince Mirsky, to whom I must refer once more, underscores Chekhov's "pessimism," his "realistic gloom," his gentle melancholy, his pity and sympathy, his consummate artistry. He links him with Turgenev in the "cult of inefficiency," and there is his dominant emphasis. Chekhov, he declares, with more than a touch of paradox,

Of Chekhov as an artist, Prince Mirsky speaks, to be sure, in the highest terms. But "Chekhovism" as an historical mood of Russia—a mood for which he appears to hold Chekhov in some measure responsible—he condemns unsparingly as "a stage of the past we have no grounds to be proud of, of a past which is largely responsible for the greatest shame of Russian

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 history, the inglorious bankruptcy of the middle classes (intelligentsia) in 1917."

An American who does not read Russian, while at liberty to take exceptions to almost any American interpretation of Chekhov, should, I think, dissent warily from an obviously well informed and acute Russian critic. All the same, I am constrained by the full force of my own personal reaction to my author to protest against accepting pessimism, negativity or defeatism as the keynotes of Chekhov's character, and, therefore, as the logical essence of Chekhovism. The center of the man is positive. The force of his character is positive. The letters prove it.

Chekhovism is always defeated in war, but in the long run Chekhovism undermines war and returns generation after generation to its task of defeating the passions which make war possible. Negativity can perform no such stupendous work. To declare that Chekhov made "a cult of inefficiency" is a partisan's disparaging way of saying that Chekhov had an exalted, inalterable faith in humane culture, which you, for one, can't quite bring yourself to share. You probably believe that humane culture, like Christianity, is too rare, too slow. It doesn't get "results." It is too fragile for this world. It is too easily trampled under and made naught of by any uprush or inrush of vigorous barbarism.

Poor Chekhov! I take it that he is out of date in this respect only: He thought he was standing for "European culture" as against "Asiatic barbarism" If his life had been spared ten years longer he would have seen the European frock coats cast aside just as hastily as the Asiatic smocks. And if he had stood fast by his own ideals he would have withdrawn to some

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 place "above the clouds" to laugh and weep with scorn and with compassion.

I am afraid that he was not a "joiner." He was not easily enlisted in Great Causes. He even shrank back suspiciously from membership in a literary "union." It reminded him, he said, of a German who had taught a cat, a mouse and a merlin to eat from one plate. He wrote for a conservative paper; and when some one, scenting popular sympathies in his stories, asked him if he were not slipping over toward liberalism, he replied that the question constrained him to consult his "innards." After consultation he reported that he was neither liberal nor conservative, but against pedants, nincompoops, madmen of all stripes. I think our new generation is beginning to turn toward that unnamed party which originates in negations, yet after all does come to stand for something quite definite.

Open the volume called "The Life and Letters" and you will find out quickly enough what Chekhov stood for, what serious purpose he had, in what sort of "practical" activities he was willing to be enlisted.

Descended from a peasant ancestry, familiar through his impecunious and hardworking boyhood with the Russian village, Chekhov knew intimately and revolted from the repulsive side of the Russian peasant: his ignorance, his boorishness, his inebriety, his gluttony, his dishonesty, his unbridled passionateness, his brutality, his chronic habit of slapping children in the face and clouting menials over the head with a shoemaker's last. All that aspect of "Asiatic" manners he observed and painted with merciless fidelity in scores of stories, for which he is credited with being the first unsentimental realist to deal with Russian village life.

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 But Chekhov quite ceased to be a peasant. He had enjoyed immense advantages: a decent and intelligent family life, full of kindly and affectionate feeling; a university training followed by a medical education; and early and lifelong association with cultivated men. He knew modern science and modern literature. He read Darwin, Spencer, Buckle; Goethe, Schiller, Hauptmann, Nordau, Nietzsche; Zola, Bourget, Daudet, Maupassant; H. B. Stowe and Thoreau; Cervantes; Ibsen; Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Grigorovich. He emerged from the peasant class into the intelligentsia. He emerged from Russia into Western civilization. And very keenly at an early age he felt responsible for conducting both his life and his art like a European gentleman who was also an intellectual.

You can see him applying that standard effectively to his own friends, to the actors in the theater, and, very significantly, to such authors as Tolstoy and Gorky. The sincerity and elevation of Tolstoy's spirit he profoundly revered: he recognized the man's essential nobility, and for that reason loved him above all other Russian writers. But Tolstoy's asceticism and his glorification of the peasant he regarded as wide aberrations from common sense. Chekhov hadn't the faintest desire to return to the peasantry. He knew it too well. He admired the talent of Gorky, befriended and helped him. At first meeting with him he was pleased with Gorky's intellectual outlook, pleased with everything about him except his peasant smock. Later he reacted against something raw, overstrained and violent in him—Maxim had a tedious tendency to "scream" under excitement and roar a man down. Chekhov had a well bred hatred of domination and

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 could never have been duped into exchanging one tyrant for another. Chekhovism eludes tyrants.

Whether the fine spirit of a gentleman is inside a man is tested less conclusively in drawing room and club than in family life. Chekhov's relations with his parents were beautifully tender and regardful. When his future wife visited in his home she found its atmosphere delightful. His family letters, especially to his brothers, are charming. They are alive with affectionate interest. They are spontaneous, spirited, sympathetic, candid, stimulating and rich in excellent advice on the handling of artistic problems, on the payment of debts, and on the way to behave and to feel if one insists upon living with a woman to whom one is not legally married.

To one of his brothers, who is trying to write stories, he makes himself a literary coach and gives away all the little secrets of his craft. To another brother, Nicolay, the painter, he administers needed moral tonics—the poor fellow was ill and also, it seems, a little unkempt. There is a remarkable letter to this brother, dated 1886, written in response to Nicolay's complaint that he is not "understood." Anton thinks just a touch of the Dutch uncle is "indicated" by the symptoms. "The trouble with you," he says, in effect, "is that you are in a false position. You really wish to associate with cultured people and you are still dreadfully half-baked and amazingly uneducated." Then follows Anton's analysis of the responsibilities of an educated man. I wish there were space for more than a condensation of it:

Educated people, in my opinion, must satisfy the following conditions:

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 (1) They respect a man's personality, and therefore they are always tolerant, gentle, polite, yielding. . . . (2) They are compassionate, and not only with beggars and cats, for they grieve in their soul for what the naked eye does not see. (3) They respect other people's property, and therefore they pay their debts. (4) . . . They do not show off, they behave in public as they behave at home, they do not throw dust in the eyes of humbler people, they do not chatter, and do not make up soul-to-soul conversations when they are not asked. . . . (5) They do not belittle themselves to arouse the compassion of others. They do not play on the strings of other people's souls so that they shall sigh over and fondle them. . . . (6) . . . They do not care about such false diamonds as acquaintance with celebrities, shaking hands with the drunken P. . . Doing a farthing's worth, they do not walk about with attaché cases as if they had done a hundred rubles' worth. . . . (7) If they possess talent, they respect it. For it they sacrifice rest, women, wine, vanity. . . They are proud of their talent. . . . And also they are fastidious. (8) They foster the æsthetic feeling in themselves. . . . From woman they require, not a bed. . . . They, especially if they are artists, need freshness, elegance, humanity, the capacity for being not a. . . but a mother.

A notable program that, coming extempore from a young fellow of twenty-six, desperately busy, up to his neck in medicine, up to his neck in short-story writing for the newspapers, and already attacked by the disease which eventually carried him off. I call attention to it because it contains a good part of the ethical code of Chekhov. It is perfectly genuine. There is no windy inflation in the man—nothing to

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 puncture. The ideas and spirit of that letter—its good sense and its sensitiveness—pervade all the family letters and all the relations of his life pretty consist ently straight through to the end. And these rules for decent behavior by no means constitute his entire conception of the obligations devolved upon a man by accepting membership in the intellectual class. Courage, gayety, vivacity and the "light touch" are clearly elements in his ideal, as they are also constant elements in his practice.

The letters to Olga Knipper I read with mixed feelings. They are a batch of ante-and-post-nuptial love letters almost too intimate for publication. An intellectual in love and in the intimacy of marriage. Piquant themes. Rather curiously, as it seemed to me, their substance is far inferior to that of the other collection. Many of them are little more than flights of caresses and salutations of the author bowing down at the "little feet" of the lady, till his forehead knocks on the floor. Nevertheless, I should defer to Chekhov's unquestionably superior knowledge of the right thing in this connection and assume that he knew what the recipient wanted, except that she herself frequently complains of his brevity and his triviality—to which he often replies with announcement that he has had his hair cut and has brushed his teeth but could not bathe.

His playful epithets are amusing: "My sweet actress," "popsey," "sweet dog," "ginger-haired dog," "my fiery dog," "my splendid spouse," "my little crocodile," "my little whale," etc. So is much of his incessant banter amusing, especially when he plays at being a brutal peasant, threatens to "smash" her if she doesn't write, reminds her that he is her "lawful

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 husband" and has a "perfect right to beat her"—when she lets a single day go by without a letter. But all this sustained to the very end and involved, these caresses, with the distressing medical details of the progress of his disease becomes a little ghastly.

And yet I am not sure that the correspondence is not a model of what a dying gentleman's letters ought to be when he is married to a wife of whom he has grown very fond, but whom he is obliged by his principles and by his magnanimity to leave quite at liberty to absent herself all winter, following her own profession on the stage in Moscow. This much is clear: only a highly civilized man could have played Chekhov's part in that marriage with unfailing gayety and unfailing generosity.

Chekhov was tremendously industrious at all periods of his life. While he was dying he undertook the writing of his best play, "The Cherry Orchard." He put it through. "Ineffective" is a word that does not apply to the Chekhovism that one finds in the letters. With the ineffective "Russian Hamlet" of Turgenev, with the really unpractical and impotent members of the intelligentsia—idle, chattering, vodka-drinking triflers—he has personally as little in common as he has with the Asiatic manners of his peasants or with the stolidity of his bureaucrats, or with the self-satisfaction of his new bourgeoisie.

Oh, once upon a time, doubtless, he felt in himself something of the melancholy impotence of Ivanoff in the play of that name; something of the automatism expressed by the author Trigorin in "The Sea Gull"; much, perhaps, of the vague unrest expressed by the idealistic student Trophim of in "The Cherry Orchard." But Chekhov himself, as revealed in the

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 letters, is a man who early took himself in hand, organized his aims and efforts and drove with incessant energy toward a perfectly definite goal.

But I haven't finished my account of genuine Chekhovism till I say that when Chekhov had emerged from the peasantry and had become an intellectual he proceeded then to emerge from the intelligentsia in order to become an individual and a "free artist."

The artist, too, has his ethics and his honor. "Respect yourself, for the love of Christ; don't give your hands liberty when your brain is lazy." That is pure ethics. The first principle of honor is that the artist must preserve his integrity as a spectator, letting nothing interfere with the pure objectivity of his vision. We know, of course, that "pure objectivity" is an illusion, and doubtless Chekhov did also; but there is a relative objectivity which may furnish a working principle:

To this should be added his more intimate avowal of skepticism and positive faith in a letter of 1889:

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There is his skepticism.

There is his faith.

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LEWELYN POWYS, like R. L. Stevenson, entered upon his literary career with a sinister experience which I have heard the witty euphemists in a sanatorium describe in jeweled phrase as "spitting rubies." This experience subsequently gave a fine edge to his appreciation of the Masai curse: "May you never spit white again!"—the noble savage as observed in East Africa does not overflow with brotherly love. It also contributed—this experience—toward edging his appreciation of many other things, and, again, as in the case of R. L. Stevenson, it already bids fair to get him into serious trouble with the critics.

Mr. Powys emerges for us out of a background reekingly British. He emerges by virtue of his talent for bringing into high and often into startling relief the universal interest in whatever theme he touches.

He has, for a minor example, the habit of talking in print about the members of his own family, and the habit of dedicating his books to them. What with affection, derision, humor and cutting irony he has, within the limits of "Skin for Skin" given a distinct flavor and a memorable word to both his parents and to nearly all his numerous brothers and sisters. Yet they but flicker across the pages. They are but notes of the background from which he himself emerges with

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 a figure—not reekingly British—the figure of an uncompromising post-war pessimist with a marvelous faculty for expressing a vision which will encounter quick sympathies in disenchanted people all over the world.

He was born in 1883, eighth of eleven children, at Dorchester, famous town in the domain of the "Wessex" pessimist, whose somber intuitions of long ago we feel as so prescient and so refreshing. He was born in a very English home, apparently fixed in English traditions of what used to be considered the best sort: upper middle class; Church of England; Cambridge University for generations; addiction to country life in the southern countries; William Cowper somewhere in the family tree; the sword of an East India uncle hanging in the library of the rectory; family prayers; maids bringing in cakes and tea.

As for the immediate family, a mother with the gift of sorrow; a white-headed pater, a fine leonine figure of the Victorian divine; a sister with the gift of ecstatically identifying herself with nature; brothers—three or four of them writers, notably. Theodore and John, and the lot of them men of enterprise and talent, unconventional thinkers, talkers, suitable persons to sharpen one's wits upon, suitable fellows to assist one in breaking out of the paternal sheepfold—goatish sharp-horned young pagans in their youth, butting their way out of the "bourgeoisie," butting their way to intellectual freedom.

We got our first sharp impression that Llewelyn Powys was arriving with something of more than parish lane concern when, in 1923, he published an arresting little volume called "Ebony and Ivory," containing sketches and stories of East Africa and southern

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 England—containing also a personality with a pungently bitter tang. In 1924, ostensibly eschewing "æsthetic effects," seeking only the beauty of a merciless veracity, he returned in imagination to the swart continent, and plucked at its mystery with even starker grip, with even more potent effect, in "Black Laughter." Now, in "Skin for Skin," with only occasional allusions to the profound and shattering adventure of his soul as a stockman in Uganda, he reverts to the origins of his vision and his point of view, giving us, in the same almost incredibly poignant style, his experience as an invalid in an Alpine sanatorium and as a convalescent in Southern England, during the period between his twenty-fifth year and his five years' sojourn in Africa.

I read these three books with a quickening of consciousness which I regard as one of the chief rewards for reading anything. I read them with intense excitement, exclaiming over page after page: "Upon my soul, what a writer! How the man can write!"—or words with an even higher accent but to the same effect. Among imaginative modern interpreters of nature and the soul of alien peoples, he belongs with men of the first mark—with Pierre Loti, Charles M. Doughty, D. H. Lawrence.

But already I hear a dissentient murmur rising, which sounds something like this: "Yes, a very striking writer, to be sure. Impressive books—in a way. But unpleasant . . . morbid . . . a taint in them. Clearly a man of abnormal sensibilities. Really, unhealthy books, you know . . . cruel and of a most dubious morality. A sick man's vision of life—after 'Skin for Skin' transparently so."

A sick man's vision of life. My first impulse is to

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 parody Lincoln on Grant's whisky-drinking; you remember, when critics informed him that his commander was habitually soaked in whisky he inquired: "What brand? I want to send some to my other generals." My first impulse is brutally to ejaculate: "Would that more of our authors were ill!" But one must be serious and sober, and one must admit that here is a subject that asks a little threshing-out. What is the relation of disease, particularly tuberculosis, to the development of literary talent? Does it affect one's vision of life in such fashion as to invalidate the vision?

A night or so ago I was sitting before a fire with a robust and sanguine friend who, like myself, restricts a physical strength adequate for a lumberjack, adequate for driving logs through the rocks of a foaming river, to driving a little fountain pen over sheets of smooth white paper. We were full of the summer, full of the delight of not even trying to think, full of remembered pleasure in making something with our hands and in going somewhere with our feet—the sweet, heavy thoughtless monotony of building stone walls all day long in a country garden, the joyous, thoughtless effectiveness of swinging an ax in the woods and such entirely satisfying activities as swimming, canoeing and tennis.

"The ideal human life," I said, "is in some physical action which one has just brains enough to perform." "Yes," agreed my literary friend, and he began to brag of the beauty of his garden tools and of the glorious workmanship and singing rhythm of a scythe. "I am convinced," he concluded, "that no one takes to writing who hasn't something physically or mentally the matter with him." We were in precisely the mood, you see, to be impressed by recollection that Powys and

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 Stevenson and Symonds and Hood and Keats and Sterne were "TB's" and that there must have been something abnormal about Chaucer and Shakespeare—must have been! Thank heaven, there was.

Now, in the case of Stevenson, evidently it was a point of pride and honor to play the part of a well man in life and in letters. So far as possible he suppressed in his public thinking and feeling, and even in his private consciousness, the fact that on his body a "damned defeat" had been made. Latter-day critics ridicule his point of honor; declare him unsuccessful in his gallant pretense; "explain" him by tracing everything to his illness; and—quite absurdly, in my opinion—attempt the destruction of his literary reputation by the same stroke. I doubt whether Stevenson himself was fully aware in how many ways and how deeply his art was affected by his disease. But that is another question. Our point now is that he based his honor and his philosophy and his art upon the assumption that he possessed a normal mind, equal to all hazards, and also competent to furnish sound entertainment to healthy people.

Mr. Powys is of another generation, which attacks the "problems of life" from a different angle. I fancy he is consciously somewhat anti-Stevensonian. He speaks, at any rate, superciliously of the "courtly collect," "Virginibus Puerisque," which Stevenson wrote at the Davos Platz sanatorium. I can even imagine his swearing, with a round Elizabethan oath, that he will have none of this "gallant pretense." As for him, his honor, his philosophy, his art, are to be fashioned in absolutely open recognition of this stunning fundamental fact of his bodily circumstance: that he, a young fellow to whom life has just feigned to wish the

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 top of the morning, he, strolling through flowers of a sunlit garden, rejoicing in his youth,—discovers of a sudden that myriads of cane-like micro-organisms have taken lodgings in his lungs, and that the struggle for possession of them is "on" between him and invaders more ruthless than Vandals and Huns.

It was rather a shock. It did not come to him gradually, but abruptly, in a mouthful of blood—knowledge of the sort of infested tenement he had leased, consciousness that his spirit now, at any time, might be evicted without notice and turned adrift on the chill air. It was a shock, but it did not floor him.

On the contrary, it startled him upright, it stabbed him broad awake. He began to think and to feel with unwonted vividness. And in a world which had become singularly bright and sweet to his senses, a vision dawned for him and abided with him and widened till it made a background for all our banqueting and revelry. Should he veil it? Nothe. The first sentence of "Skin for Skin" flaunts his theme: "I first discovered that I had consumption during the small hours of a November night in the year 1909"—and it is 1925 now. In the entire period of his literary production, then, Mr. Powys has had a lively awareness that his house was on fire and that he was his house; that to Alpine snows and African heats he must flee from what he must carry with him.

A vision of life reported by a sick man under menace of death—may we dismiss that as "interesting, in a way," but not significant for the rest of us? Evidently Mr. Powys thinks not. His contention is that he, by a slight excess in the malignity of nature toward him, has attained an intenser sense than most men of the conditions which nevertheless confront and encompass

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 us all. We—the rest of us—dance before a pictured curtain masking a bottomless abyss. For him, the veil has been rent—that is all; he dances with a wilder elation because he sees where the last figure ends.

The men of science and the physicians, in their confidential hours, are in agreement with: Mr. Powys. They tell us that the difference between a well man and a sick one is so small that we should brag about it in whispers, for fear of the overhearing gods. We are all infected, and it is merely a question of how long we can "keep up." We are all hosts of invisible enemies waiting only for some favorable coincidence of falling temperature, tainted food and wet sidewalks to make an insurrection and dispossess us. We are all swimming in seas of noxious micro-organisms; the stronger swimmers manage to keep their noses above the surface a little more steadily and a little longer than the others; but sooner or later they too grow weary, throw up their arms, gasp, get a mouthful and go under, go down, forever and ever. That is the normal thing.

The abnormal thing—no, let us not say that—the queer, inexplicable thing, is that, though we have a proverb "as sure as death and taxes" most of us think and feel and act as if we should live forever, not in our Father's mansion, but right here in our five-room apartment at the corner of Riverside Drive and Seventy-second Street. We never get up to see the rising sun nor watch to see the going down of the planets nor walk to the house where Washington Irving lived, six blocks east of us; but, half asleep, we go mooning along in the strange hallucination of health and longevity till cold hands take us by the

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 throat and remind us, when it is time to die, that we have not yet begun to live.

It does seem to stand to reason that the soundest views of life should be expressed by men who refuse opiates and briskly manage their affairs and husband their moments in a shrewd wide-eyed awareness that they are under sentence of death.

But this bottom-of-the-cup realism, this straight unblinking look at The End—doesn't it freeze the heart, palsy enterprise, overcast heaven's blue and the verdure of earth and, in short, destroy both the illusion of seriousness and the reality of mirth in the play of the petites marionettes who make their trois petits tours and then go away? The traditional portion of his family, friends, and neighbors thought that it should.

When Llewelyn Powys was stricken—so he remembers it—they dealt with him in the manner established by Job's comforters for dealing with a man who has "got his." They engloomed his bedside with orthodox prayer and bungling condolence and mute bewilderment and the general lack of imaginative sympathy customary on such occasions. His father supplicated divine intervention. His mother, "who ever loved sorrow rather than joy," resented his purposed migration to Switzerland, wishing him to return to the family home—"to die there peacefully clinging to the Christian hope." One brother nervously betrayed his fear of infection. The old stonemason assured him that he had "a churchyard cough." And, amid these ministrations, he had transient moods—so he tells us with a devastating stroke of his irony—he had transient moods when, taking the sacrament in the parish church, he thought he might "become as a little child and go to heaven along with the Master of Corpus."

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 "To become as a little child—along with the Master of Corpus." Obviously that is one of the points at which one exclaims: "Upon my soul, what a writer!" One aspect of the genius of Llewelyn Powys, the Voltairean aspect, is lit by the blinding flash which issues from that astounding juxtaposition. I have murmured the phrase over and over to myself—"Along with the Master of Corpus, along with the Master of Corpus"—and each time that I have murmured it I have seemed to hear all the stained-glass windows of fashionable Christendom rattle as in an earthquake. It is necromantic—no less.

Mr. Powys revolted from the ministrations at his sickbed. He did not wish to die—still less did he wish to spend the residue of his days, long or short, in preparing his genial spirit for the shroud. Life clamored within him that it is better to be anything alive—a midget, a mud-eating lobworm, a white-bellied beetle—than a "dead" stone. At first he was stung into sharp rebellion by what he mistook for the exceptional character of his fate. He felt an extraordinary mental activity. "I became," he declares, "like one drunken with wine. A torrent of words issued from my mouth." He dramatized his situation and railed at God. But he didn't expect to be heard. He didn't even believe with any "realizing sense" in the reality of his fate. "My head became completely turned, and I chittered at Death like a little gray squirrel who is up in a fir tree out of harm's way."

It was in a high-class sanatorium in Switzerland that coolness returned to Mr. Powys and self-collection became possible, and he began to shake off the mortuary consolations of English parish Christianity, and to reconstruct his personal philosophy on a realistic basis.

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 I admire enormously the little delicate strokes with which he produces just enough of the sanatorium life and atmosphere to suggest how and where it impinged upon his consciousness, modifying it steadily, insensibly, in the direction of the creed held, perhaps, by most experienced inmates of such institutions—a creed which might be described as a mild and cautious form of Epicureanism, with intervals of great philosophic quietude following the excessive "spitting of rubies."

These young people draw the covers over their heads when the rumor runs that a clergyman or a pious "good woman" is coming through the corridors. And yet nothing interests them, among themselves, like exchanging free views, in absolutely free language, upon religion and metaphysics and the wider implications of science.

Nothing interests them like religion, unless it be love—playing at love, delicately, with girls of an ivory pallor, not averse to a caress in their "zero hour," or when they are lying in mortal stillness after a return from an "engagement" in the front line trenches. After one has chatted for a little with a Hungarian pessimist who gives one an aphorism on the necessity of working in order to forget one's destiny, one taps at the door of Daphne, and sits with her for a while: "I could not endure that you should be wicked with any one but me."

No, nothing interests them like love, unless it be bawdry. Their first inquiry of a newcomer is: "Have you any naughty books?" For these and their scribbled verses and their epigrams and their picturesque imprecations on the food and service of the sanatorium—imprecations to the excogitation, elaboration and artistic polishing of which they devote a morning's

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 careful meditation or long hours of the midnight watch—all these circulate, along with their Victrola records, from room to room, as the chief media of social exchange. And when any remark particularly "good" or particularly "naughty" is devised by any of them it floats through the halls, swift as a whiff of ether, bringing relief and a quickened sense of life to liers-inbed, a little bored by watching the rise and fall of their temperatures and by wondering what progress or regress has been made since the last time they looked, with the aid of the X-ray, into the operations beneath their own breastbones of those swarming micro-organisms, so zealously obeying the Almighty's behest to "increase and multiply."

In a sanatorium "enlightened selfishness" may be described as the official philosophy, and it is deliberately prescribed to patients as the only philosophy fit for them to embrace. The two positive watchwords which Mr. Powys recalls from that period are "good manners" and "expedience." On the negative side: "Insensitiveness is the one cardinal sin." In the depths of consciousness, however, one places as the grand consolation, the foundation stone upon which rise courtesy and gaiety and vivacity and all other amenities—in the bottom of consciousness one rests ultimately upon this grand consolation: "Nothing matters." The maxim is not incompatible with a great deal of eagerness in all the chief concerns of life and punctilious care in the little ones. Often it seems conducive to just the proper degree of internal coolness for the best external functioning of hot little men.

When Mr. Powys emerged from the philosophical school of the sanatorium he found that he did not relish "the smell of the inside of churches," but that the

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 inside of an English tavern seemed savory and right and all in consonance with his new realism: "Here, at any rate, no spiritual treachery is tolerated; here, at any rate, no deceitful idealism stretches tendrils white and sickly. He who sits down on a tavern settle must even take the world as he finds it. He must know what birth means, and that we come into the world in no very cleanly manner; he must know what love means, and wrath, and lust, and, above all, death. In a tavern, come winter, come summer, the truth will out."

Now in "Ebony and Ivory" and in "Black Laughter" Mr. Powys carried his personal philosophy far from the sanatorium, where he first encountered it in general practice, and tested it for its universal values among the brutalized English stockmen and big game hunters, the Indian traders, the black "boys" and the animals, wild and domesticated, of a ranch in Africa of 30,000 acres, grazing 2,000 cattle and 14,000 sheep.

But before he entered on his career as ranch manager he had subjected his sensibilities, acutely sharpened to the sweetness of life by the prospect of death—to the loveliness of southern England, where he tasted the delight of a stately Elizabethan garden and brushed the dew from bluebells and pink campions while the cuckoos called, and roamed on Egdon moor, "in the meadows by the river Yeo," and between "musk-laden Wiltshire hedges," trying his brother John's advice to the convalescent, to divert his mind "from what is mean and sordid, so that large, luminous thoughts may roll in upon it like amber-colored waves."

The effect upon him of passing from the most exquisitely cultivated beauty of the English scene to the

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 raw savagery of an African wilderness vibrates in all three of his books. The contrast is an obvious principle of composition in "Ebony and Ivory." It is an even more intimate and pervasive element of his consciousness throughout "Black Laughter." Perhaps the reader will feel its potency most amazingly if he turns from reading "Skin for Skin" to "Black Laughter."

"Skin for Skin" ends, I ascertained by reference, with another attack of "spitting rubies," and with a picture of an invalid who, after having recklessly courted disaster, lies on his back, "perfectly motionless, like a rabbit that 'freezes' in a thicket of thorns, in the hope that he will not be seen, in the hope that the danger will pass him by." But what I remember, without reference, in this book is a fragrant gorse bush at the top of an English lane and a young man there, intent on the "murmuring rapture" of a honey-bee buzzing among the golden bloom.

From that one turns, in "Black Laughter," to darkness and wind and flying sparks from a little Uganda train which at midnight dumps this lonely fugitive at a station on a plateau of East Africa. He crawls exhausted into a rusty bed in a match-board shanty roofed with sheets of corrugated iron, leaving the door open so that he may look through its ebony-black aperture into the cavernous blackness of Africa. He is too much excited for slumber, visioning no longer the honeysuckle lanes and dreaming orchards of his childhood, but dark immensities of wilderness peopled by "naked black men, asleep at the moment by the white ashes of myriads of campfires with their tall spears ready to hand." When at length he dozes off, uneasily, filled with "ancestral misgivings," it is to

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 open startled eyes and find himself sitting bolt upright on his creaking bed, roused by the long reverberation of a lion's roar. Before Mr. Powys is done with that astounding welcome, the reader himself is ready to yell with the excitement of it.

Doubtless the invalid's nerves were a little "jumpy" at first, overwrought and subject to "uncanny" suggestion. You and I might be startled by a lion's roar or rendered uneasy under "the flat equatorial moon" by the moaning of hyenas "as they slunk along the darkened banks of forest streams nosing for death with heavy, obtuse jowls." But who that was not a sick man would have been troubled at the tropical noontide by a sudden awareness that he was "being looked at, that from behind the trellis or from behind the bloom of a mammoth nasturtium, a haggard and very old chameleon was peering at me, intelligently, cynically." Who but a sick man would have been troubled by the excited eyes of rabbits—eyes "black as ivy berries"—eyes peering from a fissure of a rock as if in query as to what purpose "could have brought this pale, deliberate gorilla to invade their lofty isolated retreats."

But Mr. Powys's nerves steadied down as he went about his wholesome human business of managing black labor and tarring, dosing and castrating 2,000 cattle and 14,000 sheep, so that his brother, the former manager, might with an easy conscience be off to fight the Germans. The invalid's nerves, in the course of five years of farming, so far approached normality that he was able to slaughter and butcher a bullock, knock down a black boy, shoot a caged leopard, fight fire, trap lions, get a sulky native witch doctor out of a hut by touching a match to it, and, I should say, carry most parts of the white man's burden among subject

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 peoples. He made, it appears, for a sick man, no bad deputy among the savages during that period when,—as he muses, his "own race"—the abler, "healthier" portion of it—"his own race, along with the others, was causing the very crust of the planet to tremble with its barbaric and malignant onslaughts."

Yet, going with steadier nerves about his business on an African ranch, he did, nevertheless, continue to observe things which bore on his personal philosophy and developed the fundamental pessimism which had originated in his primary philosophic intuition and upon which rests his superstructure of mild, cautious and sensitive hedonism.

He observed the hideous cruelty of white men from "Christian" countries toward their black servants and laborers. He observed the hideous cruelty of the blacks toward one another—poor, pitiful, abject devils in whom obviously was neither hope nor prospect of a "blessed resurrection." He pursued his observation down the scale of animal life, watched the rancher baiting the lion's trap with the headless corpse of a native, the leopard rending the cattle, the ticks clinging to the sleek body of the cheetah, ticks and maggots and tapeworms and smallpox struggling to reduce all life to carrion, while foul-beaked vultures hovered over all. Cruelty, rapacity and lust were at the heart of the plot, and with a strange shudder of exaltation he recognized all those hideous passions in himself, squarely faced the fact that he was one of the plotters.

I think critics rather misinterpret Mr. Powys's thrill at the discovery of his own cruelty. His exultation is due to his progress in self-knowledge. He is thrilled by seeing through himself and recognizing that

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 he is cruel, like a lion, like a savage, like a bandit, like a prime minister, like a little child.

I will quote you now a philosophic summary from the first of the books, "Ebony and Ivory":

But we have said all this, haven't we? some of us—among ourselves—privately, and then dismissed it as morbid, as a sick man's vision of life, as inconvenient, as not a respectable way of conceiving things and not respectful to the universe. We have said these things. We have half way known them. Something—merely beginning with the introspection of an invalid—has made Llewelyn Powys flamingly aware of them. And the curious fact is that, in consequence of a general increase in self-knowledge and, still more, in self-acknowledgment, among "civilized" people since the World War, there is hardly any one to be found, no matter how sound his lung cavity happens to be, who will stand up and dispute the truth of them. Unless neomysticism has more for us than yet meets the eye it looks as if the reconstruction of our personal philosophies would have to begin there—about where Mr. Powys stands.

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HE publication of a popular and complete edition gives me a desired occasion to inquire a little into the relations between Stevenson and the "modern" school of novelists and essayists. At the present moment those relations are decidedly strained. My own notion, briefly stated, is that spokesmen of "the modern school" are, as Hamlet remarked of the little eyases, exclaiming "against their own succession." They ought, I think, to be saluting Stevenson as a valiant forerunner in their own movement toward that sharper self-knowledge and that more candid self-acknowledgment which animate the important writers of all periods.

But the "moderns" seem to miss this vital link between their efforts and the effort of Stevenson. They are rather bent on drawing a line than upon establishing a connection. For example, that delightful cockney novelist and shrewd disciple of Gissing, Mr. Frank Swinnerton, strains the relation between Stevenson and his heirs to the breaking point. He expresses the asperity and the condescension of the heirs in a critical study of the testator, bristling with such distinctions as these:

The modern school of novelists. . . provides little enough material for loving hearts. The modern school

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 says to its readers: "You are wicked, selfish, diseased, but horribly fascinating, and I'm going to set you right by diagnosis"; and the reader feels a sting in the fascination. Stevenson says, "We are all mighty fine fellows; and life is a field of battle; but it is better to be a fool than to be dead; and the true success is to labor"; and the reader feels that Stevenson is One of Us! He is not austere; he does not ask uncomfortable questions; he makes no claims upon his readers' judgment, but only upon their self-esteem and their gratified assent.

Stevenson begins, just as the moderns do, just as Llewelyn Powys, for example, does: he begins with austere diagnosis. He makes all the fundamental admissions which they make: he admits the wickedness, selfishness, disease, and horrible fascination at the heart of life. But he recognizes also that mere diagnosis does not "set you right." A diagnosis such as that of Llewelyn Powys, which I have just discussed, is not the end, but only the starting point, of a personal philosophy which is to be truly realistic.

The real distinction between Stevenson and the moderns is that, while they devote themselves to elaborating diagnosis, he devoted himself to the elaboration of therapy. Or, to shift from Mr. Swinnerton's clinical images, let us say: At the age of twenty-five, Stevenson had definitely ascertained what was the matter with him and with life. He had looked into all the abysses which Mr. Powys is astonishingly fathoming at forty

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 two. And then, never oblivious of his darker vision, he turned to the task of fashioning, on the verge of the abyss, a dance and a music as heartening as the sound of bagpipes.

The grimmer members of the modern school say, in effect: "We are going to exclude from the audience of significant modern art the following classes: children, nice young girls and boys, old maids, old fogies, the entire ruck of the bourgeoisie, and all people who insanely insist that they are happy and contented. We shall address only stern, unblinking adults, such as are at least theoretically pessimists and we intend to give them their first full realizing sense of the abyss."

To that I reply, "Bring on your abyss!" That is one perfectly legitimate object of letters. I like to think of myself as an "unblinking adult"—not dizzy at precipices. I am ready to hear whatever honest report the moderns may bring in concerning their soundings in the abyss. But, surely, for an adequate literary movement, the exclusions of "the modern school," as Mr. Swinnerton describes it, are too wide, its remorseless intention is too narrow. Ultimately it will be forced to expand and make room for the dancing and music of children and for all the other folk to whom Stevenson showed, with so much grace and charm in the showing, how to be happy in "playing the game."

The game of which we are speaking is not optional—is not so regarded by my crowd. It must be played. Therefore, it is not a whit more the business of a realistic personal philosophy to acknowledge where it ends than to devise good ways of playing it with some spirit and with some style to the end. But I definitely exclude here discussion of Stevenson's great rôle as in-

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 structor in the game, contributor to its rules and keyer-up of the sporting spirit on the grounds.

That is not our theme. What I wish to inquire is whether this graceful fellow is alive yet or whether he has succumbed to the only thing which really threatened him—the danger of being too much at his ease in Bohemia, too much a play-boy.

A quarter of a century ago I had read everything of Stevenson's then accessible, and in every year since I have reread some portions of his work. In all that time I have not exhausted him, and the violence of reaction against him by the "movement" writers puzzles me. Probably I shall have to be classified as an incorrigible Stevensonian.

Inevitably the long crusade of the anti-Stevensonians against him, his character and his art, and against us—the Stevensonians—our character and our taste, infuriates me. All of them, from the atrabilious W. E. Henley to Messrs. Swinnerton, Steuart and Hellman —all of them say such nasty things about us: about our author and his readers. In general, they are consistent in their very curious line of attack. First, demonstrating that he was an invalid and an immoral man, they contend that his work is invalidated by the fact that it expresses too much of his invalidism and too little of his immorality!

It is true that when last fall Mr. Steuart discharged his double-barreled blunderbuss in Stevenson's direction Mr. Swinnerton took him roundly to task for his bad shooting. (I had taken him to task for his superfluous and exultant repeppering of the straw man set up for his own peppering by the ingenious Henley.)

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 But no one has dealt more drastically with Stevenson than Mr. Swinnerton himself, and no one has said nastier things about him and about those who persist in admiring him. Doubtless he knows what he is about. He calls it criticism, but he means war. Stevenson persists in enchanting readers generation after generation. He fails to "senesce" as a writer should do who has been before us so long. Mr. Swinnerton desires to give him a knock-out blow and to drag him out of the circle of his glamour, so that there will be elbow room and attention for "the modern school of novelists." But let the Stevensonians consider the mortal nature of such thrusts as these—if they really reach home, if they really touch the man we know:

In short, this R. L. S., it seems, was a swathed, coddled, and timorous weakling of a tedious virtuosity, consciously fashioning toys and polishing truisms "fit to be culled and calendared for suburban households."

Now, I confess that I enjoy the clash of school with school in a struggle for survival, and I like encounter

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 with a critic who drives a thesis hard against the ribs of an adversary. A stiff fight over the body of a wounded or assaulted leader animates the scene, recruits fresh combatants and jolts the sleepy-eyed to partisanship. But I like, too, a nice regard for truth in these collisions—the blade of the swordsman entering a joint in the armor and not shattered on impenetrable steel, or coarsely used as a bludgeon. And to lapse a little into the Elizabethan style of my youth, most of these things which Mr. Swinnerton says about Stevenson seem to me "as false as hell," and for saying them I could "eat his heart in the marketplace."

It should perhaps be explained that the Stevenson controversy has been waged in great part over the heads of the public. Poems, letters, essays, unfinished novels, commentaries by Mrs. Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, and all sorts of supplementary evidence, which even old readers had not seen, constantly entered into the debate. Much of the material employed by disputants on both sides has remained till recently in manuscript or in semi-private publication or in separate collections of the letters or in stately subscription editions of the collective works which, for many of us, were too expensive to ink and thumb in the familiarity of private ownership. As for previous popular and unauthorized "dry goods" editions, they contain, relatively speaking, but an expurgation and abridgment of the man, upon which no argument can now rest.

The material in the new South Seas Edition described as "not previously published in any popular edition" includes more than a dozen introductions to

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 the individual volumes, by Lloyd Osbourne, vividly sketching his stepfather at various ages of his life from twenty-six to his death; five "ethical" papers; twenty-two pages from the Silverado diary, first published in the Vailima edition; some eighty pages of critical reviews; a play, "The Hanging Judge," first published in the Vailima edition; a story called "When the Devil Was Well"; an autobiographical fragment of twenty pages containing an important statement of his relations to Mrs. Sitwell and Sidney Colvin; "Moral Emblems"; nearly two hundred pages of new poems; half a dozen unfinished stories in "The Ebb Tide" volume; the juvenile "History of Moses," with sundry sketches; a "Protest on Behalf of Boer Independence"; Stevenson's "Companion to the Cook Book," and, above all, the letters, all of them, four volumes of them, of which more than a hundred "appear here for the first time in a popular edition."

I say this is the best possible counterblast to the undermining operations of the anti-Stevensonians. None of them, from Messrs. Hellman, Steuart and Swinnerton back to the atrabilious Henley—none of them, I firmly believe, will be able permanently to impose his destructive views upon a public which has, as now, easy access to the complete works.

I have emerged from my explorations brimming with fresh wonder as to where the anti-Stevensonians collect their impressions. What wild and savage life have these London and Edinburgh critics lived which enables them to speak of Stevenson as a physical weakling, barred from a romantic life of action because, forsooth, "he was obliged to take care of himself, to be home at night, to allow himself to be looked after"!

What lions have these critical fellows shot with a

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 bow and arrow, that they turn up superior noses at Stevenson, who merely consorted with thieves and harlots in the slums of Edinburgh and London, ran through the professions of engineering and law before he was twenty-five, explored the Scotch coast in a sailboat, canoed the Sambre and Oise, slept in a lonely bivouac à la belle étoile in the Cévennes, fled to San Francisco by emigrant train, ran away with a wife and family, camped on Mount St. Helena, chartered his own schooner, sailed the South Seas for three years, feasted with cannibal chiefs, refused to sleep with their wives, conspired with Kanaka kings, was threatened with deportation, planted a wilderness, governed a small tribe of savages and died in his boots?

If these lofty critical fellows hold that Stevenson's sheltered and coddled life starved and devitalized his romance, come, let us bring them to confession and require them to tell us what sort of dare-devil existence a really "modern" writer must live.

This is Mr. Swinnerton again. But where did he pick up that impression? Not, surely, from considering with any attention Stevenson's long heart-breaking fight for his own morality, his own religion, his own love choice, and his own profession, against the stubborn opposition of his parents and all the embattled forces of time, place and circumstances. Can't they see, these superior critics, that what they call a "toy," this romance of "Kidnapped," for example, with its

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 desperate flight of David and Alan Breck Stewart through the heather is a vital poetic symbol for the whole course of Stevenson's running fight for life both physical and spiritual?

"The teaching of the essays is one of compromise, not of enlarged ideals."

Well, now, who was it before Stevenson that compounded the French artist with the shorter catechist and was in dead earnest about both? Was it Wilde or Pater or Ruskin or Carlyle? Who, for the behoof of us all, cured himself of all reverence for the stereotyped mid-Victorian Calvinist, and for "the common banker," and for all types whatever of smug, prudential, conforming "respectability" Who taught us that if a sour morality was all we had, for pity's sake to keep it, but to keep it to ourselves? Who took his favorite authors—Montaigne and Shakespeare and Bunyan and Dumas and Hazlitt and Thoreau and Whitman—and derived from them, and tested to the hilt in his own experience, a modern gospel, realistic, based on self-knowledge and self-acknowledgment, boldly individualistic, with independent standards of honor and loyalty, with a quite fresh assortment and proportioning of virtues, gleaming among them courage and charm and gaiety and passionate kindness and fidelity inflexible to one's calling?

If Stevenson did not enlarge ideals, who was it between 1870 and 1893 that clear-cut, brightly colored and popularized just his type of Bohemianism throughout the English-speaking world, and in particular infatuated with it starved, stodgy, stiff, frock-coated America? Did it change the tune here, or didn't it?

Yes. But some of the iconoclasts tell us, with an

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 immense deal of scorn, that this picturesque Bohemian pleased the clergy!—never stopping to inquire whether that fact was creditable to the clergy or discreditable to him; whether it indicated that he had been won to their view or they to his. The iconoclasts noticed that he "preached," without noticing what he was preaching; and that he wrote "Lay Morals," without noticing what virtues he commended; and that he composed prayers, without noticing the objects of his supplications or the nature of the deity that he addressed. And so, one must assume, they reached the conclusion that his vision of life was essentially conventional, his beliefs spiritually timid, and his maxims acquiescent and compromising.

Assuming that his moral ideas were purely conventional, others of the iconoclasts argue that he was a hypocrite, with obvious reference to the field of sexual morality. They produce evidence for believing that in early life, at any rate, his conduct partook more of the French artist than of the shorter catechist. Mr. Osbourne, indeed, tells us that he was involved in several tempestuous affairs with women, and that he never heard him regret the experience. Mr. Steuart, of course, made this the outstanding feature of a twovolume life. Several of the "new poems" are corroborative. Why did not Stevenson speak out frankly all that he thought and felt about these matters, as "modern" writers do?

Well, now, in the first place, modern writers don't. The most "outrageous" of them is still so far from his own ideal of self-acknowledgment that it is indecent of him to twit Stevenson with compromise in that field. Living in an environment, as he declared, of realism à l'outrance in the South Seas, he ventured in "The

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 Beach of Falesà" to introduce an illicit relation under a fictitious marriage. You may read in the introduction and in the letters how he strove against editors and publishers in order to present to English and American readers of thirty-five years ago that mild overture to modern realism. After this attempt he concluded that he knew "nothing—except that men are fools and hypocrites."

As all observant readers know, Stevenson did deliberately shun the treatment of "modern love." Was that because he really desired to suppress that side of life? No, it was because he was unwilling to write falsely about it. It was because, as he said, "You can't tell any of the facts; the only chance is to paint in the atmosphere." He shunned it because he knew that he could not treat "modern love" in English in accordance with his increasing bent toward a biting realism and the sharp noting of physical sensation. He could not treat it in accordance with his own experience, and therefore he preferred not to treat it at all; for, as he said, "I can't mean one thing and write another."

But, Messieurs et Mesdames, if you believe that Stevenson's opinions in this matter reposed upon an orthodox, conventional or clerical conception of human passions, if you think that he looked timorously into the abysses of nature and shrank from the full implications of his vision—or even really concealed his vision from readers, then, I pray you, open again that "courtly collect," as Mr. Llewelyn Powys calls it, "Virginibus Puerisque," and read again with unsealed eyes, weighing phrase by phrase, those two bits of stark realism regarding life and death, which you passed lightly over twenty-five years ago, because they were

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 entitled, with a kind of classical elegance then in vogue, "Pan's Pipes" and "Aes Triplex."

Read what he says about "tearing divines reducing life to the dimensions of a funeral procession" and about "melancholy unbelievers yearning for the tomb as if it were a world too far away." Consider his glowing young pagan preference of those dwellers on the sides of the volcano who give themselves to life as to a bride—give themselves "to the appetites, to honor, to the hungry curiosity of the mind, to the pleasure of the eyes in nature and the pride of our nimble bodies." Read again his contempt of the "tooth-chattering ones who flee from Nature because they fear the hand of Nature's God," and his contempt of "respectable citizens" who, in order to keep their hats on in the midway of custom, flee life's pleasures and its responsibilities, its ecstasies and its agonies. Consider again his stunning characterization of this fertile earth—"sunshiny, lewd and cruel!" Through all the "winning music" of the world he heard a "threat," yet that music, that Panic music, "is itself the charm and terror of things." These are, he declares, at the very heart of all true romance—the charm and the terror, one and inseparable.

Where one is not the other is not. Do you understand? And is that, I ask you, the way the matter is set forth in Sabbath school?

If you wish a brief and candid expression of Stevenson's response from his early years till his death—his response to the Panic music—I commend to your attention one of the "new poems," called "Stormy Nights." He had a way, you remember, of writing poems and then of fulfilling them with his life. The famous "Requiem," for example, he wrote on a sickbed

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 in France, and then fulfilled it "under the wide and starry sky" of Samoa. But what asks your attention in "Stormy Nights" is the stark realism in his account of his passage from the fierce, stifling, suppressed lewdness of adolescence through a period of savage Indian revolt to "Greek" serenity, from the midst of which he contemplates the possibility, as the seasons pass, of entering his "Saint" Louis period. All in due season, he tells us, he will be ready to embrace the whole of life. But.

Isn't he all there in that little poem, in esse and in posse, the "R. L. S." that real Stevensonians have always known and have always loved? Isn't he all there?—the "R. L. S." who did touch the quick of life; know the sting of sex, the taste of blood; get his feet wet—wet to the waist, man; foot the open road; test sleep in lonely hills under "a clear night of stars"; fare on through blossoms—drunk with the scent of them; up rocky pitches, putting his back into it—eh, what! on to the place where the fog began, and the swift bright stream of his life went down—as he had prophesied the day before that it would—"foaming over a precipice."

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 Look up the poem, I pray you, Stevensonians, and ask yourself if he isn't all there.

And I say it is not a man of no character, and it is not a man of no genius for vital characterization neither, that can stamp, clear-cut, a figure like that of "R. L. S." into the consciousness of three generations. Try it, O superior "modern" young men! We are waiting for you.

I ask you if you can find a single one of these thirty-two volumes in which "R. L. S." is not effectively present. In running through his letters and his essays on the art of fiction I came repeatedly upon a certain ideal for the writer of romance: namely, that each chapter should (1) advance the story, (2) develop the character, and (3) embody the theme.

Now Stevenson wrote out the romance of life in many chapters, with astonishing technical versatility. There are poems, essays, criticism, descriptive sketches, travel books, plays, biography, history, short stories, novels and letters; and within most of these forms there is as much variety of form, mood, and substance as appears when one contemplates the large divisions of the complete works. Yet in each main division and in each subdivision, I, for one, feel that he advances his story, develops his character and embodies his theme. Compare him with any author of his bulk that you choose, where will you find such unity in variety, such centrality and emphasis with so little of repetition?

What is the controlling informing spirit throughout the mass? Style, of course. Not style, as his critics allege, conceived as a mere foppishness in words. Style for him is not mainly in the words but in the "web" or "pattern" which the synthetic stylist weaves in order to hold fast "a far more deep and stimulating view of

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 life and a far keener sense of the generation and affinity of events" than the styleless writer can convey.

In one of his letters Stevenson suggests what is indubitably true, that he looked in prose for a texture to which many of his fellows were indifferent and that he listened for a music to which their ears were deaf: "The little artificial popularity of style in England tends, I think, to die out; the British pig returns to his true love, the love of the styleless, of the shapeless, of the slapdash and the disorderly."

But, for all that, it is absurd to say, as his critics do, that style took him by the ear and led him away from life. It is even, in my opinion, absurd to deny that he was driving as hard as he could toward the goal of "modern" writing. He had no technique for the immense penumbral suggestiveness of some modern masters. He is nearer Meissonier than Monet. He worked with sharp form and clear color. "I have," he declared, "in nearly all my works been trying one racket, to get out the facts of life as clean and naked and sharp as I could manage it."

But every new thing that he wrote was for him a fresh problem in style, because every new thing palpitated to his sense with its own unique individual thrill. And the throb of life in the individual thing—that is what he was after. He felt along the sharp edges of "the fact," only half content with his method, groping for something beyond, fully conscious that there is no great art which shows "no blot of heart's blood and the Old Night," tormented by the desire of all "modern" writers to express "a touch, a sense within sense, a sound outside the sound, the shadow of the inscrutable, eloquent beyond all definition."

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FIRST-RATE book of its class is Brousson's account of Anatole France "in slippers"—acceptable as a basket of choice assorted nuts and fruits. Whether for consecutive reading—I profess myself a consecutive reader—or for random sticking in of thumbs, the repast is excellent. To the plum hunter one may exhibit, for instance, this comforting prescription for the overworked man of letters harassed by a heavy correspondence: Let letters, books, papers, pamphlets, telegrams accumulate in a spare bathtub till the tub is full. So advises the great French master of letters. Then sell them to the second-hand dealer at fifty francs the tub; or to the fireplace with them—without regret, without malice, opening none, with equal justice to all! Nearly four hundred pages of that quality, and better, constitute a precious contribution to what we, journalistically, call the "human" side of Anatole France's life.

I find only the title of M. Brousson's book in the translation slightly irritating. "Anatole France Himself!" We live in the age of Einstein. A quarter of a century ago we had an outburst of "true" biographies: "The True Benjamin Franklin," "The True George Washington," "The True Ananias," etc. But that arrogance of affirmation in the title is quaint

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 to-day and outmoded. What does M. Brousson's translator mean by "Himself"? Am I a whit more myself in dressing gown and slippers than in khaki and leggins or in the most formal apparel that I can master for the most public of performances? More comfortable, more happy, in one than in the other, but not a whit more myself. Indirectly this title perhaps protests against James Lewis May's "Anatole France," published in the autumn of 1924. Mr. May, coming to the master with Anglo-Saxon reverence for the "greatest living man of letters," saw in him a gracious old gentleman, with a strain of Virgilian sadness in him, who approached his disciple with a flower. Mr. May placed the flower opposite a tender passage in his Virgil, called into his mind all the expressions in the works of Anatole France which reveal his gentle and sad lucidity of soul, and declared that, for him, poetry was the master's precious and immortal part.

Now, this M. Brousson formed his impressions, took his pictures, at altogether different points of view. Moreover, M. Brousson is a different sort of artist. His Anatole France is not in the least respect a Virgilian personality. He is not, in any careful sense of the phrase, a "gracious old gentleman." He is an elderly Gallic antiquarian and voluptuary, tart, malicious, salty, a studious flatterer, an egotist, a cynic, a libertine, with a senile vanity concerning his prowess with "God's creatures."

M. Brousson has a sharp eye for the traits which attract him. He has a sharp pencil. He has a clear coherent conception of his subject as a most interesting and distinguished literary animal. His scores of brilliant distinct little pictures of him all "hang together." They produce a unified effect, which is not

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 entirely pleasant; there is a kind of willful insistence upon the hardness and selfishness and the cold-blooded sensuality of the sitter. But the work has "the note of authenticity." It is, so far as it goes, "Boswellian"; that is to say, it is objective, intelligently and picturesquely concrete, shameless, significant. But it is not, like Boswell's work on Johnson, comprehensive and exhaustive. Boswell, the sad dog, painted his Johnson and everyman's Johnson—the eccentric fellow who saved orange peel and the pious soul humbled before his God. M. Brousson hardly suggests the existence of Mr. May's Virgilian "poet," who indubitably was a part of Anatole France "himself." Therefore a more modest and honest title for this book would be "My Anatole France," or "Anatole France in Slippers," as in the original.

Within his limits, M. Brousson is delicious. He presents himself as a young man from the country, newly come yp to Paris with a bundle of diplomas from a provincial university, with a classical education, but with slight knowledge of contemporary letters—eager, erudite and unsophisticated, researching in the libraries for archeologists, to earn his keep, and shyly aspiring to literary distinction. Anatole France, fitfully working over his bags full of Joan of Arc manuscript, sends for him to assist in the reduction of that chaos, accumulated through twenty years. The church is talking of making a saint of the Virgin of Domrémy; and it behooves the great iconoclast to get to the public before the canonization. "Imagine," says M. Brousson, "the emotions of the young man from the country." To save money he walks six kilometers to the Villa Said for his first interview. He is in such awe of the master that he stops at all the cheap

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 cafés on the way and heats up his courage with cups of coffee and thimblefuls of cognac. In vain!

Introduced into the reception room, stuffed with books, pictures, reliquaries, saints and cases of curios, he finds it already filled with callers, attending the Master's leisure. The Great Man sits at his desk, formidable in dressing gown, felt slippers and silk skull cap.

The young man from the country, aghast at the discussion of matters so much beyond the depth of provincial scholarship, takes refuge behind the library ladder and at the first opportunity retreats, without presenting his letter of introduction or making himself known. One sees at a glance that the young man understands the artistic value of innocence!

A private meeting is arranged. Anatole France explains to his new secretary that his business is to hunt up learned references for "Joan," in order to shut the mouths of critics who contend that he is only a novelist. Then he examines a little the innocence of M. Brousson. He wishes to know first whether the young man has been religiously emancipated. His own

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 notion is that religion is a kind of congenital infirmity. He pulls down a fine edition of La Bruyère and reads classical authority for his position: "He who is in perfect health doubts the existence of God, but, when he gets a dropsy, leaves his mistress and sends for the priest." On another occasion when Huysmans sends by the secretary some pious exhortations to the disciple of Renan, France replies that Huysmans had better have an inquiry made into the condition of his kidneys. When the downward turn in a man's physical state comes, "he gives himself to drugs and the Deity."

It is refreshing to hear that Père Anatole did not wish for himself the reverence which he himself denied to the Deity. When his secretary addressed him as "Master" he was gently reproved:

He seems to have felt about being called "Master" as Matthew Arnold used to feel about being called "Professor."

The real solid advantagd in being famous and a member of the Academy, he assures his disciple, is that he can wear his old gray felt hat and snap his

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 fingers at statutes and magistrates. There follows an illustrative incident. A gendarme takes him to task for unconventional behavior with a "tender soul" in the Bois de Boulogne. He presents a visiting card which shows him to be a member of the Académie Française. Result: profuse apologies.

As a young man he had entertained grand and austere notions of the scholar's calling, derived from seeing members of the Academy of Inscriptions on dress parade or, after a meeting, turning over some edition of the classics in his father's bookshop by the Seine. His youthful ideal was something like this: "To live with a hobby apart from one's own century in another age, to know hardly anything about one's contemporaries, but to be intimate and familiar with Cicero, Corneille or Mme de Sévigné. That was what fame seemed to me."

"And to-day, Master?" That discreet young man repeats the offensive title. You see that he knows the old man is a bit insincere—really enjoys well enough what he pretends to despise.

"To-day, my son, fame lies in being able to do what I like. I receive ministers and publishers in my dressing gown and slippers. I give audience, and often I refuse it, to them. It's my turn to make them wait, as they often did me."

This is but negative counsel for a young man from the country bent on a career. What advice has our modern sage equivalent to that painstaking and conscientious thought which the great lexicographer gave to young Boswell's reading? Well, Père Anatole appears to believe that the young man may follow his own instincts, so far as his reading goes. "I know," he declares, "the vanity of all human learning. What

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 useless reading, what crushing knowledge, for a life so brief and passed in the midst of dunces! Why take all this tiresome luggage for so short a journey? People praise my learning. I no longer want other learning than in the realm of love. Love is now my unique, my particular study. It is to that I devote the flickering remains of passion. If only I could write all that the little god inspires in me! Dismal prudery reigns in literature, prudery more silly, cruel and criminal than the Holy Inquisition."

Day after day the indulgent and salacious "old dog"—this is Mr. Pollock's word for "the greatest man of letters" in his time—recounts to his disciple his amorous adventures, usually with a humorous twist—adventures with all sorts of heroines, concerning whom the master seems not to have been more fastidious than Sainte-Beuve, the grossness of whose tastes was offensive, it may be remembered, to George Sand, whose own tastes were, from some points of view, catholic. Again and again, the "old dog" gives to the young one the advice which Robert Herrick addressed to the Virgins. He tempers this, however, with a theory that the men who have done great things in the world have not been happy in love. He discourses at length on Napoleon Bonaparte, and is quite sure that the Little Corporal's conquests in the tented field were a kind of noisy demonstration to draw the attention of the world away from his thorny defeats under love's banner. "If Lætitia Ramolino's son overturned the world and made blood run like rain water, it was because he was impotent."

The only branch of morality to which the master gives much careful thought is the morality of writing well. His method of composition he had from Renan.

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 36 ri from Niigata, and 32 ri from Sendai. Just 16 ri to the south is the famous town of Wakamatsu, and 12$1⁄2$ ri to the north is Yamagata.

Yonezawa itself is a large town of not very prepossessing appearance situated near the south-eastern extremity of the plain. The houses are all thatched, and have no verandahs. The streets are narrow, rough, unpaved and altogether uncared for. Water from the numerous mountain-streams is led along the centre of almost every street in open conduits, which with the addition of two or three wells supply the people with water for all purposes. The late governor put up kerosene lamps, but the people demolished them, as they considered the lighting of the streets an unnecessary expense. The shiro is immense, and as all the houses within its ramparts have large gardens separated by hedges, it presents the appearance of an enormous village. There is no attempt at fortification except the usual three moats. The inner one inclosed the mansion of the daimiô and a temple sacred to the memory of Uyesugi Kenshin his ancestor,—a mighty warrior of the 16th century. The mansion has been razed to the ground, but the temple remains, and a great festival is held on the date corresponding with the 13th day of the 3rd month of the old calendar. The streets or roads in the shiro were formerly very broad, but three years ago the then governor allowed the residents to take in a quarter, and in some instances a third, on each side. This was after the conversion of Han into Ken, and was intended as some sort of alleviation to the kerai in their distressed circumstances. Some idea of the severity with which the changes pressed on the upper classes may be gathered from the fact that the principal retainers, especially those few families from whom the Karô was selected, have pulled down their old mansions in order to grow rice on their sites, and are now living in the out-buildings of their yashiki. One family whose revenue was 1,600 koku now receives a pittance of 40 bags—about 18 koku. The upper class of samurai did not draw an allowance of rice from the daimiô’s treasury, but received it direct from the

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In the course of correction he cuts out the "too finely spacious and melodious phrases." He cuts out the "dog grass," which has sprung up; the "which's," "who's" and "whose's" and "whereof's." He shortens sentences wherever possible. But, above all—this, I think, is the great secret of his limpidity—he cuts out the "dog grass," declaring that it gives the best style "a crick in the neck."

Plagiarism, asserts this liberal counselor, is nothing, provided only that you steal to advantage. What stealing to advantage means is prettily illustrated. From a biographical dictionary he copies, without changing a word, this sentence: "The lady Théroulde was rich and of good fame."

He remarks: "It's as flat and insipid as a pancake."

"But," exclaims the young man from the country, "you will see; we shall trim the good lady to the taste of the day." Anatole France, revising, writes:

"Since the lady Théroulde was rich, men said she was of good fame." It now has some character, though the lady has none. That is stealing to advantage. And Anatole France, his best friends will admit, be-

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 came "a man of great possessions," largely by such forms of theft.

M. Brousson points out that his habit of defamation was rather a consequence of his humor than of his spleen. He deprived people of their reputations, quite without bitterness or malice. Normal and conventional people did not interest him.

There is much of this enthusiastic show of affection in the record, coupled with calling downstairs, after the guest has closed the door, "Never let that man into the house again!" M. Brousson's most gorgeous anecdote is of that sort. It describes a formal call paid to Anatole France by a provincial bishop "candidating," according to the French custom, for a vacancy in the Academy. As the season was Lenten, Monsignor appeared in black. "In his poor cassock and shiny cope with worn velvet collar you would

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 take him for a humble country priest. He waits in the hall, emotional and shivering, fingering the tarnished gilt tassels of his hat and looking with a suspicious eye on his strange surroundings of medieval virgins and reliquaries cheek by jowl with pagan goddesses."

Anatole France, on the other hand, play-acting for the moment, is unusually conscious of his dignity as a prince of the realm of letters. "His fullest, most sumptuous dressing gown envelops him, girt at the loins with an antique tasseled cord of gold and yellow. On his head is the most brilliant of his skull caps; for out of all the collection of caps—moiré, silk, velvet, Persian cloth, Jouy cloth—he has chosen one of cardinal red. . . . He descends some steps and takes the bishop's hands in his.

Monsignor,' he says in a devout voice that seems to issue from his nose, 'I am deeply conscious, as indeed I ought to be, of the great honor that you do me.' And he makes a low bow."

The bishop returns the compliment, while Anatole France plays with a heavy gold ring, and then explains that, to be entirely frank, he is acquainted with the works of his host only by hearsay, having refrained from reading them out of regard for his mother, Holy Church. To which France elaborately responds that he knows the bishop's religious zeal and purity; that he himself has never read any of the bishop's episcopal charges; but that he is deeply grateful to him for making clear "that it is not possible to be at once a good Catholic and a good republican." They fall then into a discussion of great writers who were also good Catholics; and France contends that the bishop's favorite, Chateaubriand, was in reality but the inventor of a

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 new literary poison—"he was a Rousseau turned choirboy and drunk with sacramental wine."

Anatole France does not relish the rhetoric of Chateaubriand. His father had loved it, and sickened him with it, in his youth, by an overdose. He continues:

Well done, M. Brousson!

This scene, one perceives, is central. In it Anatole France figures in the most serious rôle that he played—champion of this world against the next. For the most part he seems to have impressed his secretary as a very doughty, undaunted, unshaken champion, full of gusto and gaiety to the end, immensely enjoying his life, on intimate and congenial terms with the world, the flesh, and the devil.

There were one or two things, however, which shook the Master a little, and one or two things which bored him. He didn't much relish formal society, and his servant Josephine had to be instructed to keep a sharp eye upon him to see that he changed his shirt when he set out for a drawing-room where cabinet ministers were to be entertained. On these occasions he was

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 made to perform, he was expected to show off, and he much preferred to get off in a dark corner and talk with a nonentity about a piece of Majolica, or with a pretty woman about something else. He had his public conversation by heart—all his good stories about Hugo and Renan and Maupassant—even to the tone of his voice, even to the exact point at which he pulled out his handkerchief and wiped a histrionic tear from his eye. His public conversation he performed as a matter of duty, and he performed a little as one plays old records for new friends. He was bored, too, by nature, by landscape—except when it was framed and hung inside four walls.

The things which frightened and dismayed him were illness and death. On one occasion M. Brousson was so indiscreet as to swoon in the Master's presence. He took that up seriously and sharply. He wished to know at once whether the young man did that sort of thing often. He explained that he should not like him so well—not nearly so well—if he did. He really did not care for sick people in his neighborhood. Then, again, on another occasion, the young man from the country, thinking to gratify the Master's love of glory, spoiled a visit to the Pantheon by intimating that Anatole France would be the next great man of letters to repose there.

This joyous paganism of Anatole France is, of course, an attractive religion for people who are well and happy and prosperous. If one is poor or wretched or ill, it is less consolatory. But, as M. Brousson exhibits him, this great gambler who staked all he had on the turns of this world enjoyed an almost uninterrupted run of good luck. He was one of those thoroughly prosperous worldlings who almost per-

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 suaded the author of Ecclesiastes that righteousness is "vanity and vexation of spirit," and that all that profiteth a man is to enjoy the work of his hands and the delight of his eyes and the pride of life, for the wicked get on in this life just as well as the pious, and all go together into the dust and rest in one common grave. So we see him to the end, the gay old graybeard, enjoying his meals, with a grand appetite for his dinner; eating, like a god or a drayman at a humble wine shop, a full repast of boiled beef with coarse salt and gherkins, sheep's feet in a white sauce, beans, Brie and custard tart; sniffing out a fine old Quintilian from the booths by the Seine, or chaffering with an old woman in an antique shop or chattering with a demi-mondaine in the park; then turning homeward, creeping into his canopied four-poster, and reading Casanova by tall church candles till he falls asleep.

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SCAR WILDE would have enjoyed his appearance in this large paper edition of 575 numbered copies in dull blue boards with white paper labels, chaste as a set of Wedgwood china. "I must try to live up," he might have said, "to my wide margins." He would have liked the note of ducal luxury in his personal marks on the binding: the small gold sunflower under his name in the upper left-hand corner and the seal at the center, symbolic of his literary conquests, bearing the lion rampant, the fleur-de-lis, and the harp of Erin. He would have been gratified, too, by the company of friends and critics who bring their tribute of roses and thorns to this edition of his works.

The æsthetic movement which Wilde was ultimately to mislead into unseemly places was, in its earlier pre-Raphaelite phase, conspicuous for its chivalric Arthurian reminiscences and for "the white feet of angels coming down the golden stair." (Oscar Wilde subsequently gilded the feet.) And so the general introduction is appropriately by Richard Le Gallienne, whose head and halo-like hair pleased Wilde by reminding him of the angel in Rossetti's "Annuncia-

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 tion." Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, who, I believe, posed for Rossetti's Dante, contributes a prefatory page to "The Duchess of Padua," which Wilde read to him from a lectern, over which he draped himself in the æsthetic attitudes immortalized by Gilbert and Sullivan in "Patience." William Butler Yeats, who gave the green carnation new life by transplanting it in Irish soil, introduces the fairy tales, and he speculates in his moon-stricken prose on the joy it would have given Wilde to know that his works are widely read in the land of jade and powdered lacquer and in Arabia: "In the midst of my meditation it was as though I heard him saying with that slow, precise, rhythmical elocution of his, 'I have a vast public in Samarkand. Coulson Kernahan expresses his pained distaste for "Dorian Gray," and Walter Pater's appreciative but suavely condemnatory review of it is also included.

One misses many minor figures whom one might expect to see in this procession. One misses the major figures of G. K. Chesterton and G. B. Shaw, who certainly learned from Wilde much about the uses of paradox as a form of wit and as an implement of intellectual exploration. One misses also the belligerent championship of Frank Harris. But all three of these warriors have defined their attitude toward Wilde and his movement elsewhere. The other contributors are Edgar Saltus, Richard Butler Glaenzer, A. B. Walkley, John Drinkwater, John Cowper Powys, Michael Monahan, W. F. Morse and Padraic Colum. Since Wilde in his glory regarded himself as peerless "king" of his world, he would have denied the possibility of a trial by his peers; but I think every one else will acknowledge that the publisher has

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 assembled a jury as competent and as sympathetic as a problematic man of letters could hope for.

In those years when Wilde spent his golden hours scrubbing his cell in prison, washing his tin dishes and, in the evening, reading a few chapters of the New Testament in Greek, he wrote in "De Profundis": "If life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a problem to life. People must adopt some attitude toward me, and so pass judgment both on themselves and me."

One aspect of the problem which Wilde presents to us is suggested by George Bernard Shaw as follows: "Oscar seems to have said: 'I will love nobody; I will be utterly selfish, and I will be not merely a rascal but a monster, and you shall forgive me everything. In other words, I will reduce your standards to absurdity not by writing them down, though I could do that so well—in fact, have done it—but by actually living them down and dying them down.

So far as his moral character is concerned, our jury is in substantial agreement. Wilde's own intimates cheerfully concede nearly everything which a moralistic critic cares to allege against it. They concede that he was indolent, colossally egotistical, selfish, weak, flabby, incomparably vain, insolent to tradesmen and inferiors, a flatterer of wealth and titles, a thoroughgoing snob in the English sense, extravagant and untrustworthy in money matters, intemperate in eating and drinking, incapable of genuine friendship, and a sexual pervert.

And yet we forgive him everything; and yet in his earlier years he was welcomed by every hostess in London; and yet Mr. Frank Harris declares that "he would rather spend an evening with him than

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 Oscar Wilde: A Dandy of Letters with Renan or Carlyle, or Verlaine or Dick Burton or Davidson. . . . I have known no more charming, no more quickening, no more delightful spirit. . . . It may be that I prize humor and good-humor and eloquence of poetic speech, the artist qualities, more than goodness or loyalty or manliness, and so overestimate things amiable. But the lovable and joyous things are to me the priceless things, and the most charming man I ever met was assuredly Oscar Wilde."

The solution of Mr. Shaw's "problem" is simple. Whenever we become infatuated with what we have conventionally called "a thoroughly bad man" we find on consideration that he possesses a string of virtues, sometimes rare virtues, which are not listed as such in the catalogue of the austere moralist. It was, for example, Wilde's central virtue that he enjoyed his life, enjoyed it immensely, enjoyed it in obviously felicitous circumstances, and enjoyed it keenly even in circumstances of misery and shame. That is one of the rarest of human virtues, and Wilde possessed it to an extraordinary degree. There is nothing whatever which human beings covet more, when they are honest, than a capacity for enjoyment.

Wilde possessed also an extraordinary faculty for communicating his pleasure. The "vice" of his vanity, if we choose to call it so, operated to social profit, spurring him incessantly to give pleasure in exchange for the pleasure of being conspicuous. Like all the famous dandies from whom he is descended—Beau Nash, Beau Brummel, Byron, Disraeli, D'Orsay, Bulwer-Lytton—he courted the public like a player; he dressed, posed, talked and sinned for the public, and he won the public because he kept it incessantly in a state of wonder, delight, amusement and horror. Like

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 the world's famous courtesans, bandits and assassins, he contributed by his vices no less than by his virtues to the precious sum of life's interests. Digest this "unedifying" truth as we may, all mankind loves a villain, and it is a commonplace of experience that the most atrocious criminal, if he keeps a stiff upper lip and steps out with appropriate bravado, may go to his execution amid the roses and love letters and tears and adulation of admiring thousands.

Certain of Wilde's friends who admit the numerous and gross defects in his character attempt to make a sharp distinction between his life and his works. Mr. Frank Harris, for instance, says: "If his life was given overmuch to self-indulgence, it must be remembered that his writings and conversation were singularly kindly, singularly amiable, singularly pure. No harsh or coarse or bitter word ever passed those eloquent laughing lips. If he served beauty in her myriad forms he only showed in his works the beauty that was amiable and of good report."

This line of defense is, I think, absolutely untenable. It is as untenable as the contention that his "downfall" was due to a temporary aberration or a progressive disease of the brain. There was nothing fortuitous in Wilde's downfall, except the discovery of his state of mind by the law-enforcing portion of the British public. His downfall was the logical conclusion of his career in a country which disciplines his state of mind in the criminal court. Spiritually he was no more "down" in prison than he was while he scintillated in the drawing-room. His conversation and his writings are just as "abnormal" as his career. In his poems, in his comedies, in "Dorian Gray," in his critical discourses, he paints his portrait, he displays his

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