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We seldom feel about any of his poetry that it would go better in prose, and never that it says nothing. Still he was right when he said that it was rather speech than song, though speech with a very pleasant musical accompaniment.

These musical accompaniments are what have most puzzled his critics in "Underwoods," because most of them are taken from other poets; and yet they do not make the verse sound stale or secondhand. On the one hand Stevenson seems to be playing a game, to be making English verses, like an excellent scholar making Latin ones; but on the other he manages to express himself in these verses, and to speak his own thoughts with his own voice, although to a borrowed tune. "Underwoods" is as full of Stevenson as anything he ever wrote; and yet there never was a book of poems more full of echoes. Echoes in this case is just the right word, for it was always the sound of other poems that Stevenson had in his mind when he wrote; and to that sound he married sense of his own so happily that the two seem to be, as it were, one flesh. He liked to write poems to old tunes, but he wrote them better to old tunes of verse than to old tunes of music. The rhythms and cadences of certain poets suited his own moods so well that he was able to use them as moulds of his own thoughts. He has told us how in his youth he "played the sedulous ape" to great prose writers. In his verse he was content to play the sedulous ape when he was a grown man. But in verse he did not do it out of mere blind admiration. He chose his models to suit what he had to say, and chose them so well that no one unfamiliar with them would suspect that they existed.

Even when you recognize the echoes they add to your pleasure rather than lessen it, seeming to enrich the verse with their associations; and Stevenson

can echo modern poets just as naturally as old ones. Here, for instance, is a tune from "Maud" in "A Visit from the Sea":

Far from the loud sea beaches Where he goes fishing and crying. Here in the inland garden

Why is the sea-gull flying?

Compare with this the lyric beginning

Birds in the high Hall-garden When twilight was falling.

True there is a difference of metre, but the tune is the same. Then there seems to be an echo from "Ionica" in the poem called "In the States." If Stevenson never read "Ionica" the resemblance is curious, for in this case the sentiment too is exactly that of William Cory.

With half a heart I wander here
As from an age gone by,
A brother-yet though young in years.
An elder brother, I.

The verses "To Will. H. Low" are surely written to the tune of Keats's "Bards of Passion and of Mirth" and "Ever let the Fancy roam," as, for instance,

This is unborn beauty: she
Now in air floats high and free,
Takes the sun and breaks the blue;--
Late with stooping pinion flew
Raking hedgerow trees, and wet
Her wing in silver streams, and set
Shining foot on temple roof.

Keats, it is true, got the tune from Fletcher and Wither and other Elizabethans and only perfected it; but Stevenson seems rather to have taken it from Keats in its perfected form than to have adapted it himself from the original sources. In "The Sick Child" there is naturally an echo from Blake:

Mother, mother, speak low in my ear, Some of the things are so great and

near,

Some are so small and far away, I have a fear that I cannot say.

Compare

Father, O Father, what do we here,
In this land of unbelief and fear?
The land of dreams is better far,
Beyond the light of the morning star.

But the poets most constantly echoed in "Underwoods" are Herrick, as Stevenson himself implies, and Marvell even more than Herrick. They were both poets who were often content rather to talk than to sing, but who knew to perfection the difference between prose and verse; and they were also poets who wrote about some of the very things that pleased Stevenson most and in a mood exactly like his. Therefore, when he borrowed their rhythms and cadences, he was pleasing himself; and he pleases us, by calling to mind not merely their art, but also the pleasant things with which that art was concerned. And these rhythms and cadences are like some scent of familiar flowers hanging about his verses, and with the same instant appeal to the memory. He did not attempt to catch the tune of Herrick's airiest songs. He imitated the Herrick who like himself had a childish delight in homely things and places, and who could express it in a simple enumeration of them without any overstrain of sentiment or attempt at a richer music than would suit his theme. Of course Stevenson could not be, even in conscious make-believe, quite so simple-minded as Herrick. There was a good deal of Pepys in Herrick, and clever men cannot be as uncritical of themselves in our time as Pepys was. No poet now could write anything like the couplet on Julia's leg with perfect seriousness. Therefore when Stevenson imitates the simplicity of Herrick as in his "Envoy"—

Go, little book, and wish to all Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall,

A bin of wine, a spice of wit,
A house with lawns enclosing it.
A living river by the door,

A nightingale in the sycamore!

then one knows that he is only expressing a mood which he has encouraged for the pleasure it gives him. Herrick in poems of this kind really expressed the chief desires of his life, and there is something pleasing to us in the spectacle' of a poet whose enjoyment of little pleasures is so untroubled by thoughts of "whence and, oh heavens, whither"; who never looks away from flowers or the domestic hearth towards the flaming ramparts of the world.

Stevenson has told us that he liked to play with toys long after he was supposed to have outgrown them; and in poems of this kind he makes believe to go back, not into his childhood, but into a past age of simplicity. He plays the Herrick game as if it were a game of soldiers, and takes the same pleasure in it as in one of his fanciful escapes into childhood. Poems like "The Envoy" belong not to the child's garden of verses, but to another garden of the past that Stevenson possessed in his estate of dreams, where with clipped yew hedges he could shut out the roaring and confused present. But it was only for a complete diversion that he liked to play Herrick, to empty his mind of all ideas and stock it only with delightful objects. Often he preferred

to philosophize even in his games; and when he was in one of these "semiserious, semi-smiling" moods Marvell was his chief model. He could not have chosen a better; for Marvell also wrote partly for a diversion, and yet managed to throw all the weight of his thought and all the force of his emotion into some of his trifles. Stevenson could not quite do this; and so, when Henley advised him to make a poem more like Marvell, he told Henley to

go to the devil. He had already tried his best, no doubt; and he tried again and again in poems like "The House Beautiful," "The Canoe Speaks" (which is half Marvell, half Herrick), "To H. F. Brown," and "To Andrew Lang," all of which are full of cadences remembered from Marvell and of words used in his manner. Stevenson was playing a game even when he wrote the most serious of these; but then he took life, work and play alike, sickness and travel, duties and pleasures, all as a series of games; and even death itself he liked to think of as the sleep of a tired child among its playthings

This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill.

He played a game in his stories as well as in his poems. He always treated the English language as if he were playing a game with it, and liked to fit words together like parts of a brightly colored puzzle. But we enjoy his games, as we enjoy the games of a child, because he threw his whole heart into them. All that he wrote was a little artificial. His romance is to the romance of natural epic or saga what sport is to the hunting of men who can get no food otherwise; and this artificlality is plainer in his poems than elsewhere. Yet, in spite of it, he expressed himself in them, as in all that he wrote: for games became to him a natural means of expression. No doubt his ill-health made him feel that all his life was a little unreal, and that the best philosophy, for one so eager for the fulness of life and so seldom able to experience it, was to content himwith self games. Thinking never seemed to him to be real life. Theories and ideas were well enough, but not serious business like the encountering of dangers. Therefore he was seldom in deadly earnest when he

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The idea in the poem is expressed by means of a series of symbols, and the very style is a symbol of the fact that Stevenson is trying to take life more simply than a man of his age, his training, and his nature could really take it.

That was always his desire, to take life simply; and that was the reason why he had such a love of games and toys, for they seemed to provide him with a version of life simpler than the reality. In his later poetry there are fewer echoes, but there is the same attempt at simplicity. In the ballads he tells very simple stories; but he could not find a narrative style in verse as he found one in prose, and there for once one feels that he has mistaken his medium and ought to be writing prose. They are good narrative, as he said, but when he doubted whether they were poetry his doubts were justified. His later lyrical poems are more uneven than "Underwoods." Some of them are mere failures. You can see what he is aiming at in them and you can see that he has failed. But in some the air of simplicity expresses the desire for simplicity with a peculiar though indirect poignancy.

I will make you brooches and toys for your delight

Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night.

I will make a palace fit for you and me Of green days in forests and blue days at sea.

And then there is the beautiful song “In the highlands, in the country places." where he ceases to play the game of simplicity, and confesses that the life he longs for can never be his, that he is a child of the North exiled among the children of the South Seas, not to be consoled with their games or with the alien beauties of their country. He The Times.

was not a great poet; but he had the power of expressing himself in verse as in prose, and the very indirectness of the expression when he makes believe to be simpler and happier than he is and to be contented with toys when he cannot get the reality, this moves us more perhaps than the greater and more direct eloquence of poets, who cry out for what they lack without restraint and think there is nothing in life so well worth doing as weeping because Paradise is unattainable here and now.

THE AMERICAN WOMAN.

The American woman is often represented as playing in the European marriage-market the same triumphant and devouring rôle which the Hebrew man plays in the money-market. Indeed, the dramatization of the feelings of the aristocratic English matron with marriageable daughters towards the forward policy of Transatlantic conquerors has become a hackneyed topic of modern comedy. This, however, is a small and incidental aspect of the far more interesting theme, the place and influence of the American woman in her own country. Upon few social "phenomena" do we find a larger chorus of enthusiastic agreement; nowhere is there exhibited a more general failure to realize the underlying facts of the situation. That women play a more commanding part in American society is obvious to the casual visitor; both in the home and in each wider social circle she not merely reigns but rules; and the males of her kind appear as admiring, submissive, and rather unworthy subjects. European visitors use language which suggests that the women are a distinct and a superior human species to the men, superior not only in grace and physical attractiveness, but

in character, intelligence, and individuality; and the complacency with which the American man will accept and endorse this testimony to his inferiority is accepted as quite conclusive confirmation of his judgment. When so keen and so experienced an observer as Mr. Henry James chronicles "the abdication of man," and the completeness of "this failure of the sexes to keep pace socially," further questioning of fact may seem unnecessary. America has produced its sort of man, a creature of business and politics; but as a man, he is pronounced a failure; the woman alone is a conspicuous success. Yet, "male and female created He them." The natural history aspect of this unisexual evolution ought at least to stir some curiosity, perhaps to evoke some inquiry into the standard of "success" that is applied.

Such inquiry, pushed from the field of biology into the adjoining sociology would, we more than conjecture, upset the whole fabric of illusory estimates supporting this false valuation of the sexes in America. What strikes the sometimes envious English woman as the most extraordinary achievement of her American sister, the fact that she

In

appears to have retained all the prerogatives of the age of chivalry, while absorbing all the larger practical liberties so completely that she can afford to ignore "political rights," is not difficult of explication to one who looks to the foundations of American society. the pioneer life of a new world, woman necessarily attains a large measure of independence, both of status and of character, together with some special considerations, due to her scarcity. When this primitive condition has given place to the life of the modern industrial city, with the swift emergence of a new rich class, the women of this class have not had time to lose all the transmitted energy and personal efficiency of the earlier womanhood, and adopt to the new circumstances of a leisured life some of the traditional independence. This has made her peculiarly fitted for performing the great economic function of the woman in a triumphant plutocracy, such as has arisen in America. As the ablest analyst of American society, Professor Veblen, has pointed out, the first need of the industrial male conqueror is to display his financial power through ostentatious waste and conspicuous leisure. Since natural inclination and habit preclude the successful trust-maker, railroad man, or Wall Street speculator from performing these rites in his own person, his wife and daughters become the apt instruments of the vicarious expenditure of time and money that attest his economic prowess. Hence he remains a business man; they become society ladies, carrying into this career the energy, confidence, and resourcefulness of the backwoodman's granddaughters.

The chief misjudgment of the situation by the European speculator consists in imputing to the American woman a quite unrealized domination. Male ascendency is as real and at least as strong in America as in any European country short of Turkey; the so

cial sway of the woman is due to the different valuation of "society" by the American man from that in European countries. What Mr. James and other critics affirm, that the American man is business man, politician, clubman, but leaves society with its graces and its culture largely to his wife and daughters, is quite true. But what apparently they fail to recognize is the characteristic mental attitude of the male American towards this social life. The extravagant wife and daughters, with their receptions, diamonds, trips to Europe, sprightly talk on books and art, are to them primarily a big entertainment, an expensive and elaborate "show," which they can afford to keep up, and like to pay for. The average successful male American would no more think of competing with his wife in the display of these social arts and graces, than the average Londoner who visits Maskelyne and Devant's would think of vying with the mystery men who perform there. Society in America is woman's sphere; a stimulating atmosphere, and an absence of rigorous traditions make it afford scope for cultivating those minor arts of contrivance in which women everywhere perhaps excel.

But the notion that woman's superiority in these arts implies either the "abdication" or inferior success of the American man rests on a total misunderstanding of the male attitude. These are not the serious male pursuits for any order of American man; but his real control over the social order is not less deeply rooted, because his somewhat extravagant good humor and liking for a "show-home" lead him to stick to the business of producing, and hand over the consuming functions more completely to the woman than is the case in European plutocracies. The American nouveau riche has no remnants of revivals of feudal state wherewith to make display of ostenta

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