us regret so much the scanting, as we feel it, of his story; it deprives
us in just that proportion of certain of the notes of his appearance and
his "success." _There_ was the poetic fact involved--that, being
so gratefully apprehended everywhere, his own response was inevitably
prescribed and pitched as the perfect friendly and genial and liberal
thing. Moreover, the value of his having so let himself loose in the
immensity tells more at each step in favour of his style; the pages from
Canada, where as an impressionist, he increasingly finds his feet, and
even finds to the same increase a certain comfort of association, are
better than those from the States, while those from the Pacific Islands
rapidly brighten and enlarge their inspiration. This part of his
adventure was clearly the great success and fell in with his fancy,
amusing and quickening and rewarding him, more than anything in the
whole revelation. He lightly performs the miracle, to my own sense,
which R. L. Stevenson, which even Pierre Loti, taking however long a
rope, had not performed; he charmingly conjures away--though in this
prose more than in the verse of his second volume--the marked tendency
of the whole exquisite region to insist on the secret of its charm, when
incorrigibly moved to do so, only at the expense of its falling a little
flat, or turning a little stale, on our hands. I have for myself at
least marked the tendency, and somehow felt it point a graceless moral,
the moral that as there are certain faces too well produced by nature to
be producible again by the painter, the portraitist, so there are
certain combinations of earthly ease, of the natural and social art of
giving pleasure, which fail of character, or accent, even of the power
to interest, under the strain of transposition or of emphasis. Rupert,
with an instinct of his own, transposes and insists only in the right
degree; or what it doubtless comes to is that we simply see him arrested
by so vivid a picture of the youth of the world at its blandest as to
make all his culture seem a waste and all his questions a vanity. That