TRIBUTES TO STEVENSON.

AMONG the notable expressions concerning the

late Robert Louis Stevenson and his work that have appeared since his death should be reckoned the tributes, published in McClure's Magazine for February, from the three Scottish writers-J. M. Barrie, S. R. Crockett and Ian Maclaren-who form a group which is proud to acknowledge Stevenson as its forerunner and prophet.

The writer of "A Window in Thrums" makes his offering in verse. We quote a few of his tenderly sympathetic lines, expressive of "Scotland's Lament: "

666

For lang I've watched wi' trem❜ling lip,
But Louis ne'er sin syne I've seen,
The greedy island keept its grip,

The cauldriff oceans rolled atween.
"He's deid, the ane abune the rest,
Oh, wae, the mither left alane!
He's deid, the ane I loo'ed the best,
Oh, mayna I hae back my nain !'
"Her breast is old, it will not rise,
Her tearless sobs in anguish choke,
God put His finger on her eyes,

It was her tears alone that spoke.
"Now out the lights went stime by stime,
The towns crept closer round the kirk,
Now all the firths were smoored in rime,
Lost winds went wailing thro' the mirk.
"A star that shot across the night

Struck fire on Pala's mourning head,
And left for aye a steadfast light,

By which the mother guards her dead.
"The lad was mine!' Erect she stands,
No more by vain regrets oppress't,
Once more her eyes are clear; her hands
Are proudly crossed upon her breast."

A Letter from the Author of "The Stickit
Minister."

Mr. S. R. Crockett contributes a paper on Mr. Stevenson's books, written a few weeks before his friend's death. In a letter dated December 19, 1894,

he says:

How could one alter and amend the light sentences with the sense of loss in one's heart? How sit down to write a 'tribute' when one has slept, and started, and awaked all night with the dull ache that lies below Sleep saying all the time, Stevenson is dead! Stevenson is dead!'

"It is true also that I have small right to speak of him. I was little to him; but then he was very much to me. He alone of mankind saw what pleased him in a little book of boyish verses.

“Seven years ago he wrote to tell me so. He had

a habit of quoting stray lines from it in successive letters to let me see that he remembered what he had praised. Yet he was ever as modest and brotherly as if I had been the great author and he the lad writing love verses to his sweetheart.

"Without reproach and without peer in friendship, our king-over-the-water stood first in our hearts because his own was full of graciousness and tolerance and chivalry.

"I let my little article be just as I wrote it for his eye to see, before any of us guessed that the dread hour was so near the sounding which should call our well-beloved' home from the hill.'"

Among Mr. Crockett's "light sentences are these, which are not the less sympathetic because they lack funeral draperies:

"To me the most interesting thing in Mr. Stevenson's books is always Mr. Stevenson himself. Some authors (perhaps the greatest) severely sit with the more ancient gods, and serenely keep themselves out of their books. Most of these authors are dead now. Others put their personalities in, indeed; but would do much better to keep them out. Their futilities and pomposities, pose as they may, are no more interesting than those of the chairman of, a prosperous limited company But there are a chosen few who cannot light a cigarette or part their hair in a new place without being interesting. Upon such in this life interviewers bear down in shoals with pencils pointed like spears; and about them as soon as they are dead-lo! begins at once the chatter about Harriet.'

"Mr. Stevenson is of this company. Rarest of all, his friends have loved and praised him so judiciously that he has no enemies. He might have been the spoiled child of letters. He is only all the world's Louis.' The one unforgivable thing in a checkered past is that at one time he wore a black shirt, to which we refuse to be reconciled on any terms."

Mr. Crockett finds his chief interest in Mr. Stevenson's characters, not in the stories themselves.

"But when I do not care very much for any one of Mr. Stevenson's books, it is chiefly the lack of Mr. James Hawkins that I regret. Jim in doublet and hose-how differently he would have sped The Black Arrow!' Jim in trousers and top hat-he would never have een found in the 'Black Box,' never have gone out with Huish upon the Ebb Tide.' John Silver never threw vitriol, but did his deeds with a knife in a gentlemanly way, and that was because Jim Hawkins was there to see that he was worthy of himself. Jim would never have let things get to such a pass as to require Attwater's bullets splashing like hail in a pond over the last two pages to settle matters in any sort of way.

"I often think of getting up a petition to Mr.

Stevenson (it is easy to get a round Robin) beseeching 'with sobs and tears' that he will sort out all his beach-combers and Yankee captains, charter a rakish, saucy-sailing schooner, ship Jim Hawkins as ship's boy or captain (we are not particular), and then up anchor with a Yo-Ho, Cheerily for the Isle of our Heart's Desire, where they load Long Toms with pieces of eight, and, dead or alive, nobody minds Ben Gunn."

A Word From a New Scottish Writer.

Mr. Ian Maclaren, author of "Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush," whose recent work has entitled him to membership in the group with Barrie and Crockett, adds a true Scotchman's meed of praise :

"The mists of his native land and its wild traditions passed into his blood so that he was at home in two worlds. In one book he would analyze human character with such weird power that the reader shudders because a stranger has been within his soul; in another he hurries you along a breathless story of adventure till your imagination fails for exhaustion. Never did he weary us with the pedantry of modern problems. Nor did he dally with foul vices to serve the ends of purity. Nor did he feed 'A gibing spirit

Whose influence is begot of that loose grace
Which shallow laughing hearers give to fools.'"

Stevenson in Samoa.

Mr. William Churchill tells in McClure's how Stevenson searched the world over for health, and finally took up his abiding place in the South Sea.

"This cruise ended in Apia, and there in Samoa the Stevenson family have lived ever since. Once, in our talks about the South Sea, Mr. Stevenson asked if there was any place there where a man might live if the land suited him. It led me to a description of a small plateau on Upolu, in the rear of Apia, a narrow shelf upon the mountain side, where the paths run much like ladders, where there were three springs of water, where the view over the ocean was ever restful, and stopped short of the North Pole only by reason of the earth's swelling round. His memory must have stored away the description, for the place in mind was Vailima, his home in Samoa.

"What Stevenson thought of his 'discourse in San Francisco about the South Sea, toward which his inclination was set, may be found in the early chapters of his story of The Wrecker.' Others less under the charm of the islands perhaps preferred him as a Scot rather than as a Samoan. For an instance, I have a letter from Andrew Lang, who writes: I prefer him on his native heather. I sent him materials for a Prince Charlie tale; he began it, I believe, but whether he will do it I don't know.' It may be that this is one of the two which he has left behind him. At any rate, 'Catriona' has shown that even under the sonorous cocoanuts a Scot may write a tale of moor and heather."

ΤΗ

OCTAVE THANET AT HOME.

HE January number of the Midland Monthly contains an entertaining illustrated article on "Octave Thanet at Home," by Mary J. Reid. "Octave Thanet," (Miss Alice French) now the chief literary figure of Iowa, the "Massachusetts of the West," and of its vastly important region, was born in the original Massachusetts, though she removed to Hawkeye-land when a very small child. On her maternal side she is descended from the Morton family, of Mayflower fame.

HOME LIFE AND PERSONALITY.

Quoting from a letter by the editor of the Davenport Democrat, the article states:

"At her home, Octave Thanet is more highly esteemed for what she is than for what she writes, although her friends are the most appreciative of her readers. She has taken an active interest in the Davenport Public Library, serving for some time upon its directory. In all the educational, scientific and charitable institutions of the city her patronage is invariably asked and never denied. She is an intensely busy woman; one whose humanism is as characteristic as her literary talent."

One who knew her intimately wrote: "The trait which has impressed me the most in my acquaintance with Miss French is a studious regard for her word. She never forgets to keep a promise. I could enumerate several instances where she has rigidly kept her promise in times of great trouble, when most people would forget everything but their own griefs.”

Miss French is a skillful whist player, and an evening with her at the game is an experience not easily forgotten. Such a flow of apt quotations, anecdotes and repartees, too bright and evanescent to be recorded, flash forth in rapid succession, that no one story or saying clings to the memory-one simply remembers the occasion as an ideal game of whist and wit.

"Although her manners, dress and voice are often studiously quiet, yet there is something remarkable about her personality which cannot be hid from the observant eye. Without being positively beautiful, her face is very attractive, and may be described as at once vigorous and feminine; her forehead is intellectual, and her mouth has a peculiarly humorous and kindly expression; she has a fine and coinmanding physique, and eyes which fathom one's innermost thoughts so easily that one is glad to have nothing evil in one's heart when meeting her gaze. One is quickly impressed by a certain grandeur and largeness of character, easier to comprehend than to describe. But her chief charm is her winning manner. I greatly doubt if George Eliot, Mrs. Browning or our own Margaret Fuller, excelled her as a conversationalist and in the gentle art of winning friends."

HER WORK AND THEORY OF FICTION.

Comparing "Stories of a Western Town" with two other American volumes of a like nature the writer

declares it to be "more modern in form and motif than either Aldrich's sketches of Portsmouth or Underwood's Quabbin.' Octave Thanet's style might be called a cross between Aldrich's elaborate studies daintily finished to the minutest detail and Underwood's broad, sturdy charcoal outlines."

Octave Thanet's work is of a far higher rank than "The such ephemerally popular productions as Heavenly Twins," or "Ships that Pass in the Night," and other "fantastic novels by English women about women." She has not a few points in common with Mrs. Humphry Ward.

The article concludes with this critical estimate: "It is as the portrait painter of our time that Octave Thanet will live in literature, types that we had 'always known, but never perceived that we had Her known' until we find them upon her canvas. range is so wide, her sight is so far-reaching that in the hereafter her portraits of Harry Lossing and Colonel Rutherford will stand as the types of America, even as Talbot Wynne and Adam Bede picture England."

MORE PERSONAL REMINISCENCES OF FROUDE.

THE

HE late Mrs. Ireland, who wrote the life of Mrs. Carlyle, whose intimate friend she was, has a posthumous paper in the Contemporary Review, which gives a very interesting account of her acquaintance with Mr. Froude.

FIRST IMPRESSION OF MR. FROUDE.

She went to see him about the writing of the biography. "A fine man, above the ordinary height, and with a certain stateliness of aspect, younger looking than I had expected. He must have been about seventy; well knit, but slender; a fine head and brow, with abundant gray, not white, hair; handsome eyes, brown and well opened, with a certain scrutiny or watchfulness in their regard-eyes which look you well and searchingly in the face, but where you might come to see now and then a dreamy and far-off softness, telling of thoughts far from present surroundings and present companionship. The eyes did not reassure me at that first interview, though they attracted me strangely. The upper part of the face undeniably handsome and striking, but on the mouth sat a mocking bitterness, or-so it seemed to me-a sense of having weighed all things, all persons, all books, all creeds, and all the world has to give, and having found everything wanting in some essential point; a bitterness, hardly a joylessness, but an absence of sunshine in the lower part of the face. A smile without much geniality, with rather a mocking causticity, sometimes seen; and the facial lines are austere, self-contained and marked. Laughter without mirth-I would not like to say without kindness-but Froude's kindness always appeared to me in much quieter demonstrations. His manners struck me as particularly fine and courteous; but if one was of a timid nature, one need only look in his face and fear."

66 NERO OR ONE OF THE OLD BORGIAS!"

The following extract shows that however remarkable Mr. Froude's face may have been, it did not lend itself well to sculpture: "He and I were just adjourning to the library, when he stopped a moment, and, pointing out a bust on a bookcase, the centre of three full-sized and dignified representations in marble, he said, 'I must not forget to show you the very latest addition to my treasures. What do you think of it?'

"I looked up, and, with my head full of the galleries and museums I had been visiting, said, 'It's a very terrible head, and most repellent.'

"Yes,' he said, 'I agree with you. Now, who should you say it is?'

"I, being ignorant about these things, answered vaguely, 'Nero, perhaps, or one of the old Borgias?' "Mr. Froude laughed and said, 'Try again; you ought to know it.'

is.'

666

It's a horrid-looking thing,' I said, 'whoever it

""Atrocious!' said Mr. Froude emphatically. 'Is it not? Well, I'm sorry to say it's a bust of myself, just presented to me by Sir Edgar Boehm. Very kind of him, wasn't it? And now, of course, I have to stick it up there in a very prominent place, and show it to all my friends. Pleasant, isn't it?'

"Boehm doesn't see you with my eyes,' said I. 'It doesn't remind me of you in the least.'

"And he laughed heartily, and said, 'That's well! I didn't think I was quite such a ruffian as that!'" A STORY OF SWINBURNE.

Mrs. Ireland tells another curious anecdote, this "On a time about Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Ruskin : subsequent day Froude gave me a curious account of the first time he had met Swinburne-at a dinner, where Matthew Arnold, Ruskin, Lord Houghton, and other literary men were present. Swinburne must have been little more than a boy at the time.

"After dinner, suddenly the door opened, and a little figure appeared—a ‘boy-man '—and, bounding past the guests, stood upon an ottoman, so that he could well be seen.

"The lad began spouting some of his most out. rageous poems,' said Froude, 'some of his very worst!' And the narrator smiled bitterly, continuing: We all sat in amazement till he finished, when Ruskin, making his way through the company, hurried up, and took Swinburne fairly in his arms, saying, 'How beautiful! how divinely beautiful!' Swinburne, it will be remembered, was, at this time, little more than a boy."

66

THE CARLYLE HOUSEHOLD.

Mrs. Ireland is entirely upon the side of Mr. Froude in his method of dealing with the domestic feuds of the great historian. She says: "I was impressed with a certain reticence observed by Mr. Froude in speaking of Mrs. Carlyle. We have it in her own letters that she must, at one time, have actually contemplated leaving Mr. Carlyle. And the idea

must have been discussed in Froude's presence. For he said to me that Carlyle had showed remarkable equanimity at the prospect-a prospect which might possibly be regarded in the light of a half-jest (one of those jests, however, which have within them a terrible grain of earnest). Carlyle had replied that he was very busy, full of work, and did not think, on the whole, that he should miss her very much!

"This proposal and this reply-were they pure jest, or half earnest-had, at any rate, caused keen pain to Mr. Froude. He did not wish to tell the world more than it must inevitably know of the vie intime of the Carlyles. He withheld more than can ever now be known.

"But in forcing himself to the truthful and terrible pictures he has given the public, he at least protected these dear friends from the utterly unscrupulous and monstrous distortions that would certainly have been presented by some sensational writer or other, who, with half the truth and an unbridled realism, would have produced a portrait for the world to gape at and gaze at. The position was a hard one, but Froude never flinched.

“Once only did he speak more personally of Mrs. Carlyle while I was with him, saying, 'At any rate, she told me I was the only one of her husband's friends who had not made love to her.' He certainly felt a deep compassion for her. But it was never expressed to me in so many words."

The article is extremely brightly written and, taken together with Mr. Skelton's, gives a very pleasant picture of Mr. Froude.

Mr. Froude as Cassandra.

In Blackwood's Magazine for January, Mr. Skelton concludes his reminiscences of Mr. Froude. For some reason best known to themselves Mr. Froude's executors are very anxious to prevent the publication of his letters, as Mr. Froude himself was anxious to prevent the suppression of any of those of Thomas Carlyle. Mr. Skelton refers to this in a foot note, in which he announces that this second paper will be the last of his extracts from Mr. Froude's letters. He says: "It has been stated, since these papers were in type, that he was anxious that old controversies should not be reopened; and it seems to me that in view of the risk of an improper use being made of letters which, as I said last month, must be regarded as strictly private and confidential, his executors have exercised a wise discretion in withholding their consent to any further publication."

Mr. Skelton is a lucky man, as he has succeeded in skimming the cream of his private correspondence and getting them past the censorship of the executors. Others, however, who have Mr. Froude's letters can hardly be expected to take the interdict in so philosophic a manner. After a time, probably, the restriction will be removed, and we shall have more letters from Mr. Froude, but judging from the present sample they will be all in the same strain. Mr. Froude's correspondence with Mr. Skelton sounds very loudly three notes. First, that England is going

to the dogs; secondly, that the Calvinists were the only people who saved Europe from becoming Papist; and thirdly, that nothing could exceed the wisdom and good judgment of Mr. Froude in his biography of Thomas Carlyle. The following extracts are all from letters written in the last fourteen years of Mr. Froude's life. In 1880 Mr. Froude announced:

I bother myself no more with politics, and believe that in fifty years or sooner a vulgar Cæsar will be the outcome of it.

Unfortunately he was unable to live up to this high resolve, and would probably have excused himself on the ground that although he did not bother with politics, politics bothered him. He can never escape from the gloomy consciousness of impending doom. He says:

We are to drink the cup of the Lord's fury to the bottom. But when the drunken fit is over, and we are sick and sorry again, amidst the fragments of a ruined empire, it will remain to show that Carlyle was a true seer.

I hope God knows what is going to become of us. If He does, it is all right; but there is a wild time before us.

The dubious hope which he expressed that God knows what is to become of us all is curious and characteristic. Then again he writes:

What a time we live in ! It is like the breaking up of the ice on the Neva-great cracks opening, preliminary to the general split up. Carlyle always said that the catastrophe of the Constitution was very near; and perhaps it is well that it should come now before the character of the people is further demoralized. But there will be a fine shaking of the nations when the big central mass bursts up.

Mr. Froude doubted many things, but he never doubted that he was wiser than the majority of his countrymen. Again and again he deplores the drift of affairs, which seem to him to be tending steadily to the abyss, nor did he believe that they would wake up in time. He says:

Some day or other the country will find this out, and will wring the necks of the Parliamentary vermin. But it will be a long day yet. John Bull will be an attenuated animal when the fever leaves him, with barely strength to do justice to his misleaders.

Home Rule of course excited his most gloomy forebodings, and he returned again and again to the subject of the iniquities of Mr. Gladstone and of his colleagues. His only consolation was that they would make things worse, and so precipitate the final crash.

Let them do as they will with Ireland, it will be crushed down again before ten years are out, and I shall not be surprised if our parliamentary system goes down along with it. Lord Derby once said to me that kings and aristocracies can govern empires, but one people cannot govern another people. If we have to choose between the Empire and the Constitution, I think I know which way it will be.

These prophecies of Mr. Froude may of course be fulfilled in the coming time; some others, about which he was equally confident, do not seem to be much justified by events-so far, at least. This, for instance, reads rather oddly in view of the position which Mr. Rhodes occupies at the Cape. Concerning South Africa, he wrote:

I think we shall lose that country. We are teaching every section of the people to hate us there-English, Dutch, natives alike; and unless we determine to hold the whole place by force, there will soon be nothing for us but to take ourselves off with shame.

He did not grow more cheerful as he grew older. After he had been appointed to lecture on history at Oxford he wrote also that the universities were out of joint. He says:

The teaching business at Oxford goes at high pressure -in itself utterly absurd, and unsuited altogether to an old stager like myself. Education, like so much else in these days, has gone mad, and is turned into a mere examination mill.

Almost the only topic on which he seemed to reflect with pleasure was the way in which he had treated the life of Thomas Carlyle. In this Mr. Skelton is in enthusiastic accord with his hero. He says: "No competent critic now ventures to deny that the four volumes of "Thomas Carlyle" contain one of the half-dozen great biographies in the English language."

The most interesting passage in Mr. Froude's letters on this subject is that in which he quotes a saying of Mr. Carlyle's about one of his own portraits, which cannot now, unfortunately, be identified. Mr. Froude says:

I cannot help you to a portrait of Carlyle, for none was ever made of him fit to be seen. I found in a letter an account of one in which the face, he says, is "a cross between a demon and a flayed horse."

Regarding this biography of his master, Mr. Froude says on various occasions :

Every one whose opinion is worth having will be grateful for having a true Carlyle before them, and not a mutilated and incredible one. The true figure of a true man will in the end interest all true men; and who else ought to be considered? The end will be that C. will stand higher than ever, and will be loved more than ever. When a man's faults are not such as dishonor him, we are all the nearer to him because of them, and because we feel the common pulse of humanity in him. Arcturus is not the less brilliant or beautiful because he flashes red and green instead of shining pale and calm as angelic stars ought to do.

One more extract on a familiar subject, and we leave this paper. Writing in 1889 upon the Calvinists, Mr. Froude says:

Whatever was the cause, they were the only fighting Protestants. It was they whose faith gave them courage to stand up for the Reformation. In England, Scotland, France, Holland, they and only they did the work, and but for them the Reformation would have been crushed. This is why I admire them, and feel that there was something in their creed which made them what they were. In a high transcendental sense I believe Calvinism to be true-i. e., I believe Free Will to be an illusion, and that all is as it is ordered to be. But leaving this, which belongs to abstruse philosophy, the Calvinists practically, like the early Christians, abhorred lies, especially in matters of religion, and would have nothing to do with them. If it had not been for Calvinists, Huguenots, Puritans, or whatever you like to call them, the Pope and Philip would have won, and we should either be Papists or Socialists.

AMERICA'S CHANCES IN MUSIC.

THE paper in the February Harper's on "Music

in America" is doubly valuable as coming from that really great administrative musician, Antonin Dvorák, who has come from the most musical country of the world to be the director of our National Conservatory. As a result of his observation and teachings during his two years of directorship, Herr Dvorák says that the two prominent American traits which have impressed him are "unbounded patriotism and the capacity for enthusiasm." The inquisitiveness and enterprise with which they accept their art were actually annoying, says Herr Dvorák, in his pupils. "But now I like it, for I have come to the conclusion that this youthful enthusiasm and eagerness to take up everything is the best promise for music in America."

THE STATE AND THE SCHOLAR.

The following anecdote, told by Herr Dvorák, with his commentary on it, is very expressive of the difference in the attitude toward musical art between Europe and America. "Not long ago a young man came to me and showed me his compositions. His talent seemed so promising that I at once offered him a scholarship in our school; but he sorrowfully confessed that he could not afford to become my pupil, because he had to earn his living by keeping books in Brooklyn. Even if he came on but two afternoons in the week, or on Saturday afternoon only, he said, he would lose his employment, on which he and others had to depend. I urged him to arrange the matter with his employer, but he only received the answer: 'If you want to play, you can't keep books. You will have to drop one or the other." He dropped his music.

"In any other country the state would have made some provision for such a deserving scholar, so that he could have pursued his natural calling without having to starve. With us in Bohemia the Diet each year votes a special sum of money for just such purposes, and the imperial government in Vienna on occasion furnishes other funds for talented artists. Had it not been for such support I should not have been able to pursue my studies when I was a young man. Owing to the fact that, upon the kind recommendation of such men as Brahms, Hanslick, and Herbeck, the Minister of Public Education in Vienna on five successive years sent me sums ranging from four to six hundred florins, I was able to pursue my work and to get my compositions published, so that at the end of that time I was able to stand on my own feet. This has filled me with lasting gratitude toward my country."

WHERE SHALL WE FIND OUR SONGS? Coming from such an artist and scholar as Herr Dvorák, the suggestion is decidedly interesting when he says that our negro melodies offer the most promising field for a distinctively American music. "It is a proper question to ask what songs, then, belong to the American and appeal more strongly to