is gaiety was neither the gaiety of the pagan, nor the gaiety of
the _bon vivant_. It was the greater gaiety of the mystic. He could
enjoy trifles because there was to him no such thing as a trifle. He
was a child who respected his dolls because they were the images of
the image of God, portraits at only two removes."

Here, then, we have the child crossed by the dreamer and the mystic, bred
of Calvinism and speculation on human fate and chance, and on the mystery
of temperament and inheritance, and all that flows from
these--reprobation, with its dire shadows, assured Election with its
joys, etc., etc.

3. If such a combination is in favour of the story-teller up to a certain
point, it is not favourable to the highest flights, and it is alien to
dramatic presentation pure and simple. This implies detachment from
moods and characters, high as well as low, that complete justice in
presentation may be done to all alike, and the one balance that obtains
in life grasped and repeated with emphasis. But towards his leading
characters Stevenson is unconsciously biassed, because they are more or
less shadowy projections of himself, or images through which he would
reveal one or other side or aspect of his own personality. Attwater is a
confessed failure, because it, more than any other, testifies this: he is
but a mouth-piece for one side or tendency in Stevenson. If the same
thing is not more decisively felt in some other cases, it is because
Stevenson there showed the better art o' hidin', and not because he was
any more truly detached or dramatic. "Of Hamlet most of all," wrote
Henley in his sonnet. The Hamlet in Stevenson--the self-questioning,
egotistic, moralising Hamlet--was, and to the end remained, a something
alien to bold, dramatic, creative freedom. He is great as an artist, as
a man bent on giving to all that he did the best and most distinguished
form possible, but not great as a free creator of dramatic power.
"Mother," he said as a mere child, "I've drawed a man. Now, will I draw
his soul?" He was to the end all too fond to essay a picture of the
soul, separate and peculiar. All the Jekyll and Hyde and even Ballantrae
conceptions came out of that--and what is more, he always mixed his own
soul with the other soul, and could not help doing so.

4. When; therefore, I find Mr Pinero, in lecturing at Edinburgh, deciding
in favour of Stevenson as possessed of rare dramatic power, and wonderi