BOOKS***


Transcribed from the 1896 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org





                             FAMILIAR STUDIES
                                    OF
                              MEN AND BOOKS


                                    BY

                          ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

[Picture: Decorative graphic]

                            _ELEVENTH EDITION_

                                * * * * *

                                  London
                        CHATTO & WINDUS, PICADILLY
                                   1896

                                * * * * *

                                    TO

                             THOMAS STEVENSON

                              CIVIL ENGINEER
          BY WHOSE DEVICES THE GREAT SEA LIGHTS IN EVERY QUARTER
                   OF THE WORLD NOW SHINE MORE BRIGHTLY

                   THIS VOLUME IS IN LOVE AND GRATITUDE

                           DEDICATED BY HIS SON

                                THE AUTHOR




PREFACE
BY WAY OF CRITICISM.


THESE studies are collected from the monthly press.  One appeared in the
_New Quarterly_, one in _Macmillan’s_, and the rest in the _Cornhill
Magazine_.  To the _Cornhill_ I owe a double debt of thanks; first, that
I was received there in the very best society, and under the eye of the
very best of editors; and second, that the proprietors have allowed me to
republish so considerable an amount of copy.

These nine worthies have been brought together from many different ages
and countries.  Not the most erudite of men could be perfectly prepared
to deal with so many and such various sides of human life and manners.
To pass a true judgment upon Knox and Burns implies a grasp upon the very
deepest strain of thought in Scotland,—a country far more essentially
different from England than many parts of America; for, in a sense, the
first of these men re-created Scotland, and the second is its most
essentially national production.  To treat fitly of Hugo and Villon would
involve yet wider knowledge, not only of a country foreign to the author
by race, history, and religion, but of the growth and liberties of art.
Of the two Americans, Whitman and Thoreau, each is the type of something
not so much realised as widely sought after among the late generations of
their countrymen; and to see them clearly in a nice relation to the
society that brought them forth, an author would require a large habit of
life among modern Americans.  As for Yoshida, I have already disclaimed
responsibility; it was but my hand that held the pen.

In truth, these are but the readings of a literary vagrant.  One book led
to another, one study to another.  The first was published with
trepidation.  Since no bones were broken, the second was launched with
greater confidence.  So, by insensible degrees, a young man of our
generation acquires, in his own eyes, a kind of roving judicial
commission through the ages; and, having once escaped the perils of the
Freemans and the Furnivalls, sets himself up to right the wrongs of
universal history and criticism.  Now, it is one thing to write with
enjoyment on a subject while the story is hot in your mind from recent
reading,  with recent prejudice; and it is quite another business
to put these writings coldly forth again in a bound volume.  We are most
of us attached to our opinions; that is one of the “natural affections”
of which we hear so much in youth; but few of us are altogether free from
paralysing doubts and scruples.  For my part, I have a small idea of the
degree of accuracy possible to man, and I feel sure these studies teem
with error.  One and all were written with genuine interest in the
subject; many, however, have been conceived and finished with imperfect
knowledge; and all have lain, from beginning to end, under the
disadvantages inherent in this style of writing.

Of these disadvantages a word must here be said.  The writer of short
studies, having to condense in a few pages the events of a whole
lifetime, and the effect on his own mind of many various volumes, is
bound, above all things, to make that condensation logical and striking.
For the only justification of his writing at all is that he shall present
a brief, reasoned, and memorable view.  By the necessity of the case, all
the more neutral circumstances are omitted from his narrative; and that
of itself, by the negative exaggeration of which I have spoken in the
text, lends to the matter in hand a certain false and specious glitter.
By the necessity of the case, again, he is forced to view his subject
throughout in a particular illumination, like a studio artifice.  Like
Hales with Pepys, he must nearly break his sitter’s neck to get the
proper shadows on the portrait.  It is from one side only that he has
time to represent his subject.  The side selected will either be the one
most striking to himself, or the one most obscured by controversy; and in
both cases that will be the one most liable to strained and sophisticated
reading.  In a biography, this and that is displayed; the hero is seen at
home, playing the flute; the different tendencies of his work come, one
after another, into notice; and thus something like a true, general
impression of the subject may at last be struck.  But in the short study,
the writer, having seized his “point of view,” must keep his eye steadily
to that.  He seeks, perhaps, rather to differentiate than truly to
characterise.  The proportions of the sitter must be sacrificed to the
proportions of the portrait;