I have no fancy for nicknames in any place or at any time. I have suffered too much from my own. But I dislike the familiarity of them above all in print. And yet, I could no more call Bob Stevenson anything save Bob than I could venture to abbreviate the Robert or the Louis of his cousin. He had been given in baptism a more formal name-in fact, he had been given three of unquestioned dignity: Robert Alan Mowbray. But I doubt if anybody had ever known him by them or if he had ever used them himself. When he wrote he signed his fine array of initials, and when he was not R.A.M.S., he was Bob.

Painting by Himself

"BOB" STEVENSON

It seems to me now a curious chance, as well as a piece of good luck, that the two most eloquent of the company in Louis Stevenson's Talk and Talkers should have come to us on our Thursday nights, for Bob was the Spring-Heeled Jack, "the loud, copious, and intolerant talker" of that essay just as Henley was the Burly.

He was not more spring-heeled in his talk than in evading capture for it. In his later years he made few visits. If we wanted him we had to gather him up by the wayside and bring him home with us. The newspaper work I was doing then took me the rounds of the London galleries on press days and, as he was the art critic of the Pall Mall, I was continually coming across him busy about the same work in Bond Street or Piccadilly. Nothing pleased me better than to meet him on these occasions, for he could make the dull show that I, in my dull way, was finding dull the most entrancing entertainment in London. His every visit to a gallery was to him an adventure and every picture a romance, and the best of it for his friends was that he would willingly share the inspiration which he, but nobody else, could find in the most uninspiring canvas, an inspiration to criticism that is, not to admiration-he never wavered in his allegiance to the "Almighty Swells" of Art. Once he began to talk I did not care to have him stop, and I would say, "Why not come to Buckingham Street with me? You have not seen J. for a long while." He would vow he couldn't, he must get back to Kew to do his article. I would insist a little, he would waver a little, and at last he would agree to a minute's talk with J., excusing himself to himself by protesting that Buckingham Street was on his way to the Underground, as it was if he chose to go out of his way to make it so. Before he knew it, the minute had stretched out to our dinner hour when he was persuaded that he would save time by dining with us, as he must dine somewhere; if he went right afterwards, he could still be back at Kew in plenty of time to finish his article for the last post.

Of course he never did go right afterwards-what talker ever did go right anywhere immediately after dinner when the real talk is only beginning? Presently people would filter in and now, well adrift on the flood of his own eloquence, nothing could interrupt him and he was the last to leave us, the later it grew the more easily induced to stay because he knew that the last train and the last post and all the last things of the day had gone and that he must now wait for the first things of the morning.

If I could talk like Bob Stevenson I would not be interrupted either. Greater excitement could not be had out of the most exciting story of adventure, and I do not believe he knew until he got to the end any more where his talk was going to lead him than the reader knows how the story is going to turn out until the last chapter is reached. Louis Stevenson described certain qualities of his talk, but made no effort to give the talk itself, and in Bob's case, as in Henley's, it was the talk itself that counted. There was no acting in it as in Henley's or in Whistler's-no burying of his head in his hands and violent gestures-no well-placed laugh and familiar phrase. The talk came in a steady stream, laughter occasionally in the voice, but no break, no movement, no dramatic action-the sanest doctrine set forth with almost insane ingenuity, for he was always the "wild dog outside the kennel" who wouldn't imitate and hence kept free, as Louis Stevenson told him; extraordinary things treated quite as a matter of course; brilliant flashes of imbecility passed for cool well-balanced argument; until often I would suddenly gasp, wondering into what impossible world I had strayed after him. And he would tell the most extravagant tales, he would confide the most paradoxical philosophy, the most topsy-turvy ethics, with a fantastic seriousness, never approached except in the Arabian Nights of Prince Florizel for the puppets of whose adventures, as for Spring-Heeled Jack, he was the sitter. It was a delightful accomplishment, but dangerous when applied to actual life. I cannot forget his advice once to a friend on the verge of a serious step that might sink him into nobody could foretell what social quagmire. Bob could see in it only the adventure and the joy of adventure, not the price fate was bound to demand for it. To him the mistake was the unlit lamp, the ungirt loin-the adventure lost-and, life being what it is, I am not sure that he was not right.

I think his talk struck me as the more extraordinary because he looked so little like it. In the Nineties he had taken to the Jaegers that usually stand for vegetarianism, teetotalism, hygiene-all the drab things of life. He wore even a Jaeger hat and Jaeger boots-as complete an advertisement for Jaeger as old Joseph Finsbury was for his Doctor. No costume could have seemed so altogether out of character with the fantastic, delightful, extravagant creature inside of it, though, really, none could have been more in character. It had always been Bob's way to play the game of life by dressing the part of the moment. Before I met him I had been told of his influence over Louis Stevenson, whose debt to him for ideas and conceits was said to be immeasurable, and nobody who knew Bob has doubted it. I feel convinced that Louis owed to him also his touch of the fantastic, the unusual, in dress, since it belonged so entirely to Bob and was no less entirely in keeping with his attitude towards the universe and his place in it-his tendency of always probing the real for the romantic.

Knowing one cousin and the books of the other, I should say it was Bob who, in their childhood, originated the drama of the Lantern-Bearers and the evil-smelling lantern under the great coat, symbol of adventure and daring-that it was Bob who, in their gay youth, evolved the black flannel shirts to which they owed the honour of being, with Lord Salisbury, the only Britons ever refused admission to the Casino at Monte Carlo, and which were worn by the Stennis Brothers in The Wrecker,-that it was Bob who impressed upon Louis the importance of being dressed for the scene until he surpassed himself in his amazing get-up for the Epilogue to an Inland Voyage. Bob's own disguises rarely got into print, but in Will Low's Chronicle of Friendships there is a photograph of him in his student days, figuring as a sort of brigand of old-fashioned comic opera, that shows he did not from the beginning shirk the obligations he imposed upon others. I remember a huge ring, inherited from his father to whom the Czar had given it for engineering services in Russia, which he kept for formal occasions so that when I saw it covering his finger, almost his hand, at the dinner to which we had both been invited, I understood that to him the occasion was one of ceremony and he never failed to regulate his conduct accordingly. I was glad the ring did not appear on our Thursday nights, so much freer of formality, and therefore more amusing, was he without it. The large perfection of his Jaegers in his last years was no less symbolic; in them he was dressed for the r?le of middle age which he, who had the gift of eternal youth, had already reached when I first knew him. It was a r?le to which, at the time, I attributed his concern about his health-his anxiety to know if we, any of us, had influenza before he would come home with me, his rush from the room or the house at a sniff or a sneeze. The truth is Bob shared Henley's love of the visible sign, or it may be nearer the truth to say that he shared his own love of it with Henley and his cousin who rarely, either of them, wrote anything in which it is not felt.

But Henley loved the visible sign for itself-the romance was actually in the tap-tap of the blind man's staff, in the pagan obelisk towering above the Christian river. Bob loved the visible sign for the hint it gave to his imagination, the adventure upon which it sent him galloping. He could build up a romance out of anything and nothing-he was the modern Scheherezade, but, as time went on, with nobody to repeat his stories. He could have made the fortune of any number of young men with their cuffs ready, but the only young man who ever did use his cuff was Louis Stevenson when they were young together. Bob had not the energy to put down his stories himself-he would not have written a word for publication had he not been forced to. For him the romance would have been lost in the labour of recording it, and, anyway, he was always consistent in not doing more work than he was obliged to in order to live. He had not the talent for combining, or identifying, his pleasure with his work. Painting was the profession for which he had been trained, but with it he amused himself and, as far as I know, never made a penny out of it. When he talked he would have lost his joy in the invention, the fabrication, had he thought he must turn it to profit. Of the curious twist of his imagination there remains but the faint reflection here and there in Prince Florizel and the romantic adventurers swaggering and talking splendid nonsense through the earlier tales by Louis Stevenson, whose books grew less and less fantastic as his path and Bob's spread wider apart. Even in the earlier tales Bob will not be discovered by future generations who have lost the key.

For the sake of posterity, if not for my own, I would have been wiser on Thursday nights to think less of my next morning's article than of his inventions. As it is, I retain merely a general impression and an occasional detail of his talk. I am glad I remember, for one thing, his unfailing prejudice in favour of his friends, so amiable was the side of his character it revealed-though it revealed also his weakness as critic. He had a positive genius for veiling prosaic facts with romance where the people he liked were concerned. How often have we laughed at his amiability to a painter of the commonplace who had happened to be his fellow-student in Paris, whose work, as a consequence, his friendly imagination filled with the fine things that to us were conspicuously missing, and whose name he dragged into every criticism he wrote, even into his Monograph on Velasquez, nor could he be laughed, or argued out of it.

And I am glad I remember another trick of his imagination, though it was like to end in disaster for us all, so equally characteristic was it of his genius in weaving romance from prose. He was talking one evening of wine, upon which he had large-Continental-ideas, declaring he would not have it in his house unless all his family, including the servants, could drink it without stint and also without thought of expense-though, if I am not mistaken, his household staff consisted chiefly of a decent old Scotchwoman who would have scorned wine as a device of the foreigner. The triumphant ring of his voice is still in my ears as he announced that he had found a merchant who could provide him with just the wine he wanted, good, pure, light, white or red, an ordinary brand for sevenpence a bottle, a superior brand for eightpence.

The marvel of it all was that we believed in that wine and when the company left for home, the merchant's address was in almost everybody's pocket. It was not a bad wine in the sample bottles J. and I received a day or two later, nothing much to boast of, but harmless. For the further cheapness promised we next ordered it by the case, one of red and one of white-a rare bargain we thought. But in the end it was the most expensive wine it has ever been our misfortune to invest in. For when it came in cases it was so potent that nobody could drink as much as a glass without going to sleep. I never had it analyzed, but, after a couple of bottles, I did not dare to put it on the table again, or to use it even for cooking or as vinegar. To balance our accounts, we did without wine of any kind, or at any price, for many a week to come. But we had our revenge. In the course of a few months Bob's wine merchant was summoned before the magistrate for manufacturing Bordeaux and Burgundies out of Greek currants and more reprehensible materials in the backyard of his unpretending riverside house, and it was one of our Thursday night fellow victims who had the pleasure of exposing him in the Daily Chronicle. Bob did not share our resentment. He had his pleasure in the charm his imagination gave to every drop of the few bottles he drank and managed not to die of.

I began to notice in the galleries and on Thursday nights that Bob became more and more engrossed in the question of his health and quicker to fly at a sniff or a sneeze. The time came when no persuasion could bring him home with me. He described symptoms rather than pictures, his interest in anything in the shape of paint weakened. I fancied that he was romancing, that he was playing the hypochondriac as part of his r?le of middle-age, and I thought it a pity. It might provide a new entertainment for him, but it deprived us of the entertainment of his company. Then I hardly met him at all, or if I did he was too nervous to linger before each painting or drawing, to gossip about it and everything under the sun. He would walk through the galleries with one leg dragging a little-the visible sign, I would say to myself, amused to see that he could turn romance into reality as easily as reality into romance. He would start for Kew right off, without any loitering, without any delicious pretending that he was going in the very next train and then not going until the very next train meant the very next day. But before long I learned that there was no romance about it, that it was grim reality, the grimmer to me because I had taken it so lightly. His illness was mere rumour at first, for few people went to his house in far Kew to see him. It was more than rumour when he ceased altogether to appear in the galleries, for we knew he was dependent upon art criticism for his butter, if not for most of his bread. I had not got as far as belief in his illness before the news came that he had set out upon the greatest adventure of all and that no more would Buckingham Street be transfigured in the light of his romancing, glorified by his inexhaustible fancy. I owed him much: the charm of the personality of "this delightful and wonderful creature" in Henley's words of him, pleasure from his talk, stimulus from his criticism, and I wish I had had the common sense to do what I could to make him live as a pleasure and a stimulus to others. My mistake on our Thursday nights was to keep my cuff clean, my note-book empty.

Sketch by Aubrey Beardsley

HENRY HARLAND