and
no mere idle games.

III. MORALITY.--His genius, like the genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne, was
doubly rich in the spirit of romance and in a wise and beautiful
morality. But the irresponsible caprices of his narrative fancy
prevented his tales from being the appropriate vehicles of his morality.
He has left no work--unless the two short stories mentioned above be
regarded as exceptions--in which romance and morality are welded into a
single perfect whole, nothing that can be put beside _The Scarlet Letter_
or _The Marble Faun_ for deep insight and magic fancy joined in one.
Hence his essays, containing as they do the gist of his reflective
wisdom, are ranked by some critics above his stories.

A novel cannot, of course, be moral as an action is moral; there is no
question in art of police regulations or conformity to established codes,
but rather of insight both deep and wide. Polygamy and monogamy, suttee,
thuggism, and cannibalism, are all acceptable to the romancer, whose
business is with the heart of a man in all times and places. He is not
bound to display allegiance to particular moral laws of the kind that can
be broken; he is bound to show his consciousness of that wider moral
order which can no more be broken by crime than the law of gravitation
can be broken by the fall of china--the morality without which life would
be impossible; the relations, namely, of human beings to each other, the
feelings, habits, and thoughts that are the web of society. For the
appreciation of morality in this wider sense high gifts of imagination
are necessary. Shakespeare could never have drawn Macbeth, and thereby
made apparent the awfulness of murder, without some sympathy for the
murderer--the sympathy of intelligence. These gifts of imagination and
sympathy belong to Stevenson in a very high degree; in all his romances
there are gleams from time to time of wise and subtle reflection upon
life, from the eternal side of things, which shine the more luminously
that they spring from the events and situations with no suspicion of
homily. In _The Black Arrow_, Dick Shelton begs from the Duke of
Gloucester the life of the old shipmaster Arblaster, whose ship he had
taken and accidentally wrecked earlier in the story. The Duke of
Gloucester, who, in his own words, 'loves not mercy nor mercy-mongers,'
yields the favour reluctantly. Then Dick turns to Arblaster.

'"Come," said Dick, "a life is a life, old shrew, and it