It is a matchless piece of scorn and
invective, not inferior in skill to anything he ever wrote. But that it
was well done is no proof that it should have been done at all. 'I
remember Uzzah and am afraid,' said the wise Erasmus, when he was urged
to undertake the defence of Holy Church; 'it is not every one who is
permitted to support the Ark of the Covenant.' And the only disquietude
suggested by Stevenson's letter is a doubt whether he really has a claim
to be Father Damien's defender, whether Father Damien had need of the
assistance of a literary freelance. The Saint who was bitten in the hand
by a serpent shook it off into the fire and stood unharmed. As it was in
the Mediterranean so it was also in the Pacific, and there is something
officious in the intrusion of a spectator, something irrelevant in the
plentiful pronouns of the first person singular to be found sprinkled
over Stevenson's letter. The curse spoken in Eden, 'Upon thy belly shalt
thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life,' surely
covered by anticipation the case of the Rev. Dr. Hyde.

II. ROMANCE.--The faculty of romance, the greatest of the gifts showered
on Stevenson's cradle by the fairies, will suffer no course of
development; the most that can be done with it is to preserve it on from
childhood unblemished and undiminished. It is of a piece with
Stevenson's romantic ability that his own childhood never ended; he could
pass back into that airy world without an effort. In his stories his
imagination worked on the old lines, but it became conscious of its
working. And the highest note of these stories is not drama, nor
character, but romance. In one of his essays he defines the highest
achievement of romance to be the embodiment of 'character, thought, or
emotion in some act or attitude that shall be remarkably striking to the
mind's eye.' His essay on Victor Hugo shows how keenly conscious he was
that narrative romance can catch and embody emotions and effects that are
for ever out of the reach of the drama proper, and of the essay or
homily, just as they are out of the reach of sculpture and painting. Now,
it is precisely in these effects that the chief excellence of romance
resides; it was the discovery of a world of these effects, insusceptible
of treatment by the drama, neglected entirely by the character-novel,
which constituted the Romantic revival of the end of last century. 'The
artistic result of a romance,' s