IN LANGUEDOC: AN IDYL From 'A Sentimental Journey' WAS in the road betwixt Nismes and Lunel, where there is the best Muscatto wine in all France- and which, by-theby, belongs to the honest canons of Montpellier; and foul befall the man who has drank it at their table, who grudges them a drop of it. The sun was set-they had done their work; the nymphs had tied up their hair afresh, and the swains were preparing for a carousal. My mule made a dead point.-"'Tis the fife and tambourin," said I.-"I'm frightened to death," quoth he."They are running at the ring of pleasure," said I, giving him a prick.-"By St. Boogar, and all the saints at the back-side of the door of purgatory," said he (making the same resolution with the Abbess of Andouillets), "I'll not go a step further."—" "Tis very well, sir,” said I: "I will never argue a point with one of your family as long as I live." So leaping off his back, and kicking off one boot into this ditch and t'other into that-"I'll take a dance," said I, "so stay you here." A sunburnt daughter of labor rose up from the group to meet me, as I advanced towards them; her hair-which was a dark chestnut, approaching rather to a black-was tied up in a knot, all but a single tress. "We want a cavalier," said she, holding out both her hands as if to offer them.. "And a cavalier ye shall have," said I, taking hold of both of them. "Hadst thou, Nannette, been arrayed like a duchess! But that cursed slit in thy petticoat!" Nannette cared not for it. "We could not have done without you," said she, letting go one hand, with self-taught politeness, leading me up with the other. A lame youth, whom Apollo had recompensed with a pipe, and to which he had added a tambourin of his own accord, ran sweetly over the prelude, as he sat upon the bank.-"Tie me up this tress instantly," said Nannette, putting a piece of string into my hand. It taught me to forget I was a stranger.- The whole knot fell down. We had been seven years acquainted. The youth struck the note upon the tambourin, his pipe followed, and off we bounded.-"The deuce take that slit!" The sister of the youth who had stolen her voice from heaven sung alternately with her brother, 'twas a Gascoigne roundelay — Viva la joia! Fidon la tristessa! The nymphs joined in unison, and their swains an octave below them. I would have given a crown to have it sewed up: Nannette would not have given a sous; Viva la joia! was in her lipsViva la joia! was in her eyes. A transient spark of amity shot across the space betwixt us. She looked amiable. Why could I not live and end my days thus? "Just Disposer of our joys and sorrows," cried I, "why could not a man sit down in the lap of content here, and dance and sing, and say his prayers, and go to heaven with this nut-brown maid?" Capriciously did she bend her head on one side, and dance up insidious. "Then 'tis time to dance off," quoth I. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1850-1894) BY ROBERT BRIDGES N HIS illuminating essay The Lantern-Bearers,' which in a very few pages seems to bear the secret of Robert Louis Stevenson's life and art, he puts the kernel of it in the sentence: "No man lives in the external truth, among salts and acids; but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied walls." If he was the most loved writer of his generation, it was because he freely gave his readers access to this warm phantasmagoric chamber. His "winning personality" is the phrase which his admirers use oftenest to express his charm. One of the most acute of these, Mr. Henry James, has still further defined this charm as the perpetual boy in him. He never outgrew the boy's delight in "make-believe." He tells how the cardboard scenery and plays of Skelt, "A Penny Plain, 2d. Colored," which fascinated him as a boy, had given him "the very spirit of my life's enjoyment." Boy and man, all that he needed for delight was "a peg for his fancy." "I could not learn my alphabet without some suitable mise-en-scène, and had to act a business man in an office before I could sit down to my book." Burnt-cork mustachios expanded his spirit with "dignity and selfreliance." To him the burnt cork was not the significant thing, the warm delight of it. It is not the silly talk of the boys on the links, or the ill-smelling lantern buttoned under their great-coats, but "the heaven of a recondite pleasure" which they inhabit, that is worth considering. "To find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing,"-that was Stevenson's endeavor; "for to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action." That is the very spirit of romantic youth; the search for "the incommunicable thrill of things," which his friend and biographer Sidney Colvin says was the main passion of Stevenson's R. L. STEVENSON life. "To his ardent fancy," says Colvin, "the world was a theatre, glaring with the lights and bustling with the incidents of romance.» To any one looking for the reason of Stevenson's perpetual charm, even to those who can give a score of arguments for not liking his romances, this brave spirit of youth is an adequate and satisfying motive. The young find in it a full justification for their own hopes; the middle-aged feel again the very spring and core of the energy which they have been so long disciplining and driving to the yoke of every-day effort that they have forgotten its origin; and the old find their memories alive and glowing again with the romance of youth. In sickness or in health, in comedy or tragedy, Stevenson and the characters he creates are never wholly unconscious of man's inalienable birthright of happiness. No matter how dire his circumstances, it is a man's duty to keep looking for it, so that at the end he may say that he has not sold his birthright for a mess of pottage. "If I have faltered more or less And shown no glorious morning face; This temperament in many men of a different race would surely lead to a life spent in the pursuit of pleasure,-in one long quest for new sensations, which in the end is sure to arrive at ennui and disgust. But Stevenson united the, blood of the. Balfours, who were preachers, given to metaphysics and the pursuit of moralities, with the Stevensons, "builders of the great sea lights," practical men of trained scientific minds and shrewd common-sense. The touch of the moral philosopher was never deeply hidden in his lightest work, which also showed the hand of the artisan in the skill of its construction. «What I want to give, what I try for, is God's moral," he once said; and 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' is a potent exhibition of it. How very early in life this temperament began to reveal itself in the craftsman, he shows in one of his essays: "All through my boyhood and youth I was known and pointed out for the pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy in my own private end, which was to learn to write. I always kept two books in my pocket, one to read and one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words. I lived with words, and what I thus wrote was for no ulterior use; it was written consciously for practice. It was not so much that I wished to be an author (though I wished that too), as that I had vowed that I would learn to write." And years afterward he wrote to Colvin from Samoa: "I pass all my hours of field-work in continual converse and imaginary correspondence. I scarce pull up a weed but I invent a sentence on the matter to yourself." In his youthful reading, "some happy distinction in the style" of a book sent him at once to the imitation of it; and he confesses, "I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire, and to Obermann." All this gave him what he knew to be "the lower and less intellectual elements of the art,-the choice of the essential note and the right word"; but he also knew that "that, like it or not, is the way to learn to write." To those who say that this is not the way to be original, he has given the best answer: "It is not; nor is there any way but to be born so. Nor yet if you are born original, is there anything in this training that shall clip the wings of your originality." The "love of lovely words" was one of his passions. From Skerryvore to Vailima it led him and charmed him. In 'Across the Plains' he says that "None can care for literature in itself who do not take a special pleasure in the sound of names"; and notes the poetical richness and picturesqueness of many in the United States. In his 'Vailima Letters' he recurs again and again to the liquid beauty of the Samoan language, and names "Ulufanua ": "Did ever you hear a prettier word?" he asks. There was the ear of a poet always evident in his prose as in his verse. If Stevenson is always spoken of as a man with a style, here is the reason for it. The spirit of the light-house builders, who knew that something more than inspiration was necessary to build a beacon that would stand up against the waves, was strong in him. From his boyhood to his death he was a conscious artificer in words. And if his books are to stand as beacons, here is the foundation of solid rock, here the strength of the tower. But no reader of Stevenson need be told the tower is only a stable support for the light. That is a thing of the spirit; and it glows in his works with a steady flame. With his eagerness to have a full draught of the joy of living, it was natural that Stevenson should have traveled much in many countries. The pursuit of health, which was for twenty years a pressing necessity in his "great task of happiness," was not the sole reason for his wanderings. He was always hungry for "the greater world; not the shoddy sham world of cities, clubs, and colleges, but |