om the more abiding charm which is in his writings:
the revelation of a character the most attractive of his
generation. Rarely, if ever before, have the qualities of
artistry and fraternal fellowship been united in a man of
letters to such a degree; most often they are found apart, the
gods choosing to award their favors less lavishly.

Because of this union of art and life, Stevenson's romances
killed two birds with one stone; boys loved his
adventuresomeness, the wholesome sensationalism of his stories
with something doing on every page, while amateurs of art
responded to his felicity of phrase, his finished technique, the
exhibition of craftsmanship conquering difficulty and danger.
Artist, lover of life, insistent truth-teller, Calvinist,
Bohemian, believer in joy, all these cohabit in his hooks. In
early masterpieces like "Treasure Island" and "The Wrecker" it
is the lover of life who conducts us, telling the story for
story's sake:

"My mistress still the open road
And the bright eyes of danger."

Such is the goddess that beckons on. The creed implicit in such
work deems that life is stirring and worth while, and that it is
a weakness to repine and waste time, to be too subjective when
so much on earth is objectively alluring. This is only a part of
Stevenson, of course, but it was that phase of him vastly liked
of the public and doubtless doing most to give him vogue.

But in later work like "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" we get quite
another thing: the skilled story-maker is still giving us
thrilling fiction, to be sure, but here it is the Scotchman of
acute conscience, writing a spiritual allegory with the healthy
instinct which insists that the lesson shall be dramatized. So,
too, in a late fiction like "Ebb Tide," apparently as picaresque
and harum-scarum as "Treasure Island," it is nevertheless the
moralist who is at work beneath the brilliantly picturesque
surface of the narrative, contrasting types subtly, showing the
gradings in moral disintegration. In the past-mastership of the
finest Scotch novels, "Kidnapped" and its sequel "David
Balfour," "The Master of Ballantrae" and the beautiful torso,
"Weir of Hermiston," we get the psychologic romance, which means
a shift of interest;--character comes first, story is secondary
to it. Here is the maturest Stevenson, the fiction most
expressive of his genius, and naturally the inspiration is
native, he looks back, as he so often did in his poetry, to the