nd, Mr Thomas M'Kie, Advocate, Edinburgh,
telling him of my work on R. L. Stevenson and the results, I thus
gathered up in little the broad reflections on this point, and I may
perhaps be excused quoting the following passages, as they reinforce by a
new reference or illustration or two what has just been said:

"Considering his great keenness and force on some sides, I find R. L.
Stevenson markedly deficient in grip on other sides--common sides,
after all, of human nature. This was so far largely due to a dreamy,
mystical, so far perverted and, so to say, often even inverted
casuistical, fatalistic morality, which would not allow him scope in
what Carlyle would have called a healthy hatred of fools and
scoundrels; with both of which classes--vagabonds in strictness--he
had rather too much of a sneaking sympathy. Mr Pinero was
wrong--totally and incomprehensibly wrong--when he told the good folks
of Edinburgh at the Philosophical Institution, and afterwards at the
London Birkbeck Institution, that it was lack of concentration and
care that made R. L. Stevenson a failure as a dramatist. No: it was
here and not elsewhere that the failure lay. R. L. Stevenson was
himself an unconscious paradox--and sometimes he realised it--his
great weakness from this point of view being that he wished to show
strong and original by making the villain the hero of the piece as
well. Now, _that_, if it may, by clever manipulation and dexterity,
be made to do in a novel, most certainly it will not do on the
stage--more especially if it is done consciously and, as it were, of
_malice prepense_; because, for one thing, there is in the theatre a
very varied yet united audience which has to give a simultaneous and
immediate verdict--an audience not inclined to some kinds of
overwrought subtleties and casuistries, however clever the technique.
If _The Master of Ballantrae_ (which has some highly dramatic scenes
and situations, if it is not in itself substantially a drama) were to
be put on the stage, the playwright, if wisely determined for success,
would really have--not in details, but in essential conception--to
kick R. L. Stevenson in his most personal aim out of it, and take and
present a more definite moral view of the two villain-heroes
(brothers, too); improve and elevate the one a bit if he lowered the
other, and not wobble in sympathy and tr