III
In A Child’s Garden of Verses Stevenson was doing a thing which had never really been done before. There are nursery rhymes which crystallise children’s ideas; but this book actually shows, in what we must believe to be an extraordinarily happy way, the working of a particular child mind over a great variety of matters. Its excellence is due to the fact that Stevenson’s young days, lonely as some of them had been, had never lacked interest, had always been full of those simple and direct pleasures of incident and encounter and memory which happy children enjoy. The world had been full of a number of things; and the memory of those things had abided. It was the memory of a fanciful rather than an imaginative childhood, a childhood of superstitions and sports, of a buried tin soldier and of the pleasant land of play; but we must not forget that such poems as My Treasures, poor in some of their lines, are finely imaginative reconstructions, the naïveté of which prevents many readers from estimating their quality. So with The Unseen Playmate, which, although it is a poem for grown-ups, reveals an understanding of a most important fact in children’s games far more profound than are the pretentious and unconvincing lines to R. A. M. Stevenson in Underwoods. Even if the idea of The Unseen Playmate may be the idea of a grown-up pretending, the writing of this, as of the other verses, is almost without lapse, charmingly simple and natural. I believe it is a fact that children appreciate and even delight in A Child’s Garden of Verses, not merely at the bidding of their parents, but as a normal manifestation of taste. This in itself would be a proof that the book is already a secondary nursery classic. For our present purpose, if that does not seem rather an over-bearing way of valuing a book so slight in form, it is sufficient to say that Stevenson’s success here was due to the fact that he was legitimately using the memory of actual experience. Too many of his serious, or grown-up, poems show their models; too many of them flow undistinguished by any truly poetic quality; too many of them are experiments in metre or rhyme, such as one may write for fun, but never for free circulation. The Child’s Garden of Verses alone, then, of the four volumes, exhibits a strict harmony of design with performance. Its dedication to Stevenson’s nurse, Alison Cunningham, serves only to make the book more complete.