y to make the audience wobble
in sympathy also, as R. L. Stevenson certainly does. As for _Beau
Austin_, it most emphatically, in view of this, should be re-writ--re-
writ especially towards the ending--and the scandalous Beau tarred and
feathered, metaphorically speaking, instead of walking off at the end
in a sneaking, mincing sort of way, with no more than a little
momentary twinge of discomfort at the wreck and ruin he has wrought,
for having acted as a selfish, snivelling poltroon and coward, though
in fine clothes and with fine ways and fine manners, which only, from
our point of view, make matters worse. It is, with variations I
admit, much the same all through: R. L. Stevenson felt it and
confessed it about the _Ebb-Tide_, and Huish, the cockney hero and
villain; but the sense of healthy disgust, even at the vile Huish, is
not emphasised in the book as it would have demanded to be for the
stage--the audience would not have stood it, and the more mixed and
varied, the less would it have stood it--not at all; and his relief of
style and fine or finished speeches would not _there_ in the least
have told. This is demanded of the drama--that at once it satisfies a
certain crude something subsisting under all outward glosses and
veneers that might be in some a lively sense of right and wrong--the
uprisal of a conscience, in fact, or in others a vague instinct of
proper reward or punishment, which will even cover and sanction
certain kinds of revenge or retaliation. The one feeling will emerge
most among the cultured, and the other among the ruder and more
ignorant; but both meet immediately on beholding action and the limits
of action on the demand for some clear leading to what may be called
Providential equity--each man undoubtedly rewarded or punished,
roughly, according to his deserts, if not outwardly then certainly in
the inner torments that so often lead to confessions. There it is--a
radical fact of human nature--as radical as any reading of trait or
determination of character presented--seen in the Greek drama as well
as in Shakespeare and the great Elizabethan dramatists, and in the
drama-transpontine and others of to-day. R. L. Stevenson was all too
casuistical (though not in the exclusively bad sense) for this; and so
he was not dramatic, though _Weir of Hermiston_ promised something
like an advance