t in character, especially as these
suggest and involve the casuistries of human nature. He is often a
little like Nathaniel Hawthorne, but he hardly follows them far enough
and rests on his own preconceptions and predilections, only he does not,
like him, get into or remain long in the cobwebby corners--his love of
the open air and exercise derived from generations of active lighthouse
engineers, out at all times on sea or land, or from Scottish ministers
who were fond of composing their sermons and reflecting on the
backwardness of human nature as they walked in their gardens or along the
hillsides even among mists and storms, did something to save him here,
reinforcing natural cheerfulness and the warm desire to give pleasure.
His excessive elaboration of style, which grew upon him more and more,
giving throughout often a sense of extreme artificiality and of the self-
consciousness usually bred of it, is but another incidental proof of
this. And let no reader think that I wish here to decry R. L. Stevenson.
I only desire faithfully to try to understand him, and to indicate the
class or group to which his genius and temperament really belong. He is
from first to last the idealistic dreamy or mystical romancer, and not
the true idealist or dealer direct with life or character for its own
sake. The very beauty and sweetness of his spirit in one way militated
against his dramatic success--he really did not believe in villains, and
always made them better than they should have been, and that, too, on the
very side where wickedness--their natural wickedness--is most
available--on the stage. The dreamer of dreams and the Shorter
Catechist, strangely united together, were here directly at odds with the
creative power, and crossed and misdirected it, and the casuist came in
and manoeuvred the limelight--all too like the old devil of the mediaeval
drama, who was made only to be laughed at and taken lightly, a buffoon
and a laughing-stock indeed. And while he could unveil villainy, as is
the case pre-eminently in Huish in the _Ebb-Tide_, he shrank from
inflicting the punishments for which untutored human nature looks, and
thus he lost one great aid to crude dramatic effect. As to his poems,
they are intimately personal in his happiest moments: he deals with
separate moods and sentiments, and scarcely ever touches those of a type
alien to his own. The defect of his child poems is distinctly that he is
everywhere strictly