caused me many years ago, after standing for a few minutes before Saint-Gaudens' memorial on the wall of St. Giles in Edinburgh, to walk abruptly aside from my companions into a duskier aisle of the church. The lilt of the voice, the essence and sting, the authentic bite of the personality are there. The fiddling, dancing, preaching, flute-playing, play-acting, ever-various Stevensonian personality, the Scotch Presbyterian in his French velveteen jacket is there; and he is the man that we loved.
Now the grand business of monoptic naturalistic criticism is to prove that there never was any such personality as convulses my diaphragm. The creature whose memory, mixed with the music of the organ in St. Giles, leads me weeping up the Samoan mountain to the rock-hewn tomb under the southern skies never existed. The "real Stevenson," I am assured, was a wretched, pallid, rakehelly, tuberculous fellow, so shambling, disreputable, ill-kempt, and dirty that one would be rather ashamed to be seen on the street with him. Naturalistic criticism establishes that such was the "real" man. Next, naturalistic criticism searches for this tuberculous weevil in the prose and poetry of "R. L. S."; is obliged to report that, except for a rare blood spot or so, he is not there; regretfully—O, so regretfully—announces that Stevenson the writer was a "sham," a "poser." This naturalistic attack had begun even before his death, and the family made merry over it in Vailima: "To carry a brave front though your heart quaked was a pose; to live
