LITMIR.BIZ

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eccentricity of colour. So it is with that other most impressive personage, John Silver, the smooth-spoken tavern-keeper and cook of ‘Treasure Island,’ who for cold-blooded truculence and diabolical astuteness might have been the favourite élève of Satan himself. The greatest immortals in fiction, such as Scott or George Eliot, were in the habit of painting from people they had known, though they combined the results of their studies and observations. Stevenson, although always on his guard against absurdities, seems to carry romancing into his most powerful delineations. The practice is the more effective, from the sensational point of view, that elsewhere sobriety of drawing and colouring is more closely observed.

      Nor are the Scotch stories less graphic. Kidnapped is as full of sensation as Treasure Island, with greater variety of more probable incident. When Alan is run down in the Western Seas, when he is fighting for dear life in the deck-house, when the fugitives, exhausted by thirst, heat, and hunger, are being hunted through mountains and moorland by the soldiers, and when David is cast away on the reefs off Mull, there is as much of poetry as of prose in the epic.

      It was in The Black Arrow that Stevenson came nearest to the limits of the ground on which he prudently hesitated to venture. For necessarily even his bright imagination almost ceased to be realistic in conjuring up the dim days of the ‘Wars of the Roses,’ and consequently he has failed in vividly presenting what he but faintly saw himself. The simple repetition of the expression ‘shrew’ shows how much he was at a loss in mediæval language.

      One of his charms is that he is never prolix, and his tales in the Arabian Nights are marvels of sensational condensation. Take, for example, The Pavilion on the Links, in which the absconding banker is tracked to his doom by the gentlemanly carbonari he has been foolish enough to swindle. Scarcely less thrilling is A Lodging for the Night, of which that most disreputable of all the Bohemian poets, Villon, is the hero.

      The handling of the horrible and grotesque culminated in the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, where the possible discoveries of the practical chemist are pressed into the service of the supernatural. We have spoken of the little volume as the expression of a nightmare, and indeed we happen to know that it was born of a dream. It has all the effect of having been dashed off in a prolonged trance of unhealthy inspiration, and for the touches which heighten the terrors of the unholy transformation we are indebted to a not very enviable phase of genius.

      Very different is the impression left on us by Mr. Stevenson’s poems. It is delightful to see in the Garden of Verses how happily the man can identify himself with the child; how he rises in estimation and reputation when he seems to stoop. The secret is that there is nothing of effort in the little book; that the many-sided man of the world could be a child when it pleased him, and that fancy lives freshly again in the past as it followed memory back to the nursery. It is enough merely to name Mr. Stevenson’s latest books, which are fresh in the public memory. By far the most remarkable is the volume which, after appearing in Atalanta under the title of David Balfour, was published in volume form, in 1892, with the name Catriona. It has the double charm of continuing the fascinating history of David and of Alan Breck, and of being Mr. Stevenson’s only love story. Later came The Ebb-Tide, a story of Tahiti, written, like The Wrecker, in collaboration with Mr. Lloyd Osbourne, the author’s stepson. Stevenson had met in America, some ten or twelve years ago, Mrs. Osbourne, a widow with two children, and had married her; and it was with her help that he wrote The Dynamiter. Lastly, we may mention the elaborate and beautiful Edinburgh edition of Mr. Stevenson’s collected works, which is now being issued under the superintendence of his intimate friend Mr. Sidney Colvin. By a sad coincidence the second volume of this edition appeared on the very day of the announcement of the author’s death.

      Stevenson died of a cerebral hemorrhage at Valima, the house he had built himself on the Samoan island of Upolo, on 3 December 1894. He was 44. As this obituary emphasises, he was a restless and chronically sick man who found physical relief, satisfaction and inspiration in travel. The obituary does not mention his most taxing, but ultimately rewarding, journey. In France in 1876 he fell in love with a married American woman, Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne. When she returned to California, Stevenson resolved to follow her, travelling steerage to New York on board the Devonian and then taking the transcontinental railroad. At Monterey he collapsed and was nursed back to health by ranchers. He finally reached San Francisco in December 1879 and married the by-then divorced Fanny in May 1880. She was ten years his senior, and was to prove both a vivid companion and a devoted nurse.

      The Marquis of Queensberry

      ‘A man of strong character, but unfortunately

      also of ill-balanced mind’

      

      

      1 February 1900

      

      

      The death of Lord Queensberry, which occurred last night in London, removes a curious figure from the social world. The late peer represented a type of aristocracy which is less common in our time than it was a century ago − the type which is associated in the public mind with a life of idleness and indulgence rather than with the useful aims which such a man as the late Duke of Westminster set steadfastly before him. The eighth Marquis of Queensberry was in many ways a man of strong character, but unfortunately also of ill-balanced mind, and he never turned to any account either his talents or the powers which his position gave him. For his failure to do so he was perhaps not altogether to blame. The title he bore still has associations clinging to it from the days of the fourth Duke of Queensberry, whose personality is preserved to us in the memoirs of the 18th and early 19th centuries. For more than half a century “Old Q.,” as he was called, was notorious for his follies and wildness. He began to be noted for his escapades before he left school. At 70 he was still a “polished, sin-worn fragment,” and the picture of him that lives in the mind of posterity is that of a worn-out roué,

      “Ogling and hobbling down St. James’s-street.”

      Thackeray, of course, drew a portrait of him in his younger days, when he was Lord March, in The Virginians.

      It cannot be said that the eighth marquis, his kinsman, did anything to bring the title into better repute. Born in 1844, he succeeded his father at the age of 14. The seventh marquis was killed by an accidental discharge of his gun while he was shooting, and by a sad coincidence the same manner of death befell the late peer’s heir, Lord Drumlanrig, a popular young nobleman, who had been a Lord-in-Waiting to the Queen and had acted as assistant private secretary to Lord Rosebery when he was Foreign Secretary in Mr. Gladstone’s 1892 Ministry. Shortly before his death, Lord Drumlanrig had been created, for purposes of official convenience, Lord Kelhead, so that he was able to sit in the House of Lords with his chief. A curious feature of the situation thus brought about was that the son became a peer of the United Kingdom with a seat in the Upper House, while the father was only a Scottish peer and had no seat. He had sat from 1872 until 1880 as a representative peer for Scotland, but in the latter year he was not re-elected. Lord Kelhead died in October, 1894, at the age of 27, and his brother, Lord Douglas, became heir to the title.

      Lord Queensberry was an undoubted authority on one thing, and that one thing was boxing. The Queensberry rules, which govern the contests of the prize-ring, will keep his fame alive at any rate amongst pugilists and amateurs of the “noble art.” Of his career there is little to be said. He served in the Navy for a time, and he held a commission in the Dumfriesshire Volunteers. Except in these capacities he came little before the public, save when his eccentricities were subjects of nine-day wonder for all the gossips of the town. As an instance may be mentioned his demonstration at a performance of Tennyson’s drama, The Promise of May, at the Globe Theatre in 1882. At a certain point in the play Lord Queensberry rose in the stalls and protested, in the name of Free Thought, against the manner in which the poet had drawn the character of a freethinker, denouncing it as “an abominable caricature.” He was at this time a strong supporter of Mr. Bradlaugh and other militant apostles of Atheism. Lord Queensberry’s intervention in a scandalous case which disturbed society some years ago will probably be within most people’s recollection. The action he then took was dictated by the fact that the name of his son, Lord Alfred

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