Nothing else will make up for vagueness and cloudiness here--no technical
skill, no apt dialogue nor concentration, any more than "fine speeches,"
as Mr Pinero calls them. Now the dramatic demand and the ethical demand
here meet and take each other's hands, and will not be separated. This
is why Mr Stevenson and Mr Henley--young men of great talent,
failed--utterly failed--they thought they could make a hero out of a
shady and dare-devil yet really cowardly villain generally--and failed.

The spirit of this is of the clever youth type--all too ready to forego
the moral for the sake of the fun any day of the week, and the unthinking
selfishness and self-enjoyment of youth--whose tender mercies are often
cruel, are transcendent in it. As Stevenson himself said, they were
young men then and fancied bad-heartedness was strength. Perhaps it was
a sense of this that made R. L. Stevenson speak as he did of the _Ebb-
Tide_ with Huish the cockney in it, after he was powerless to recall it;
which made him say, as we have seen, that the closing chapters of _The
Master of Ballantrae_ "_shame_, _and perhaps degrade_, _the beginning_."
He himself came to see then the great error; but, alas! it was too late
to remedy it--he could but go forward to essay new tales, not backward to
put right errors in what was done.

Did Mr William Archer have anything of this in his mind and the
far-reaching effects on this side, when he wrote the following:

"Let me add that the omission with which, in 1885, I mildly reproached
him--the omission to tell what he knew to be an essential part of the
truth about life--was abundantly made good in his later writings. It
is true that even in his final philosophy he still seems to me to
underrate, or rather to shirk, the significance of that most
compendious parable which he thus relates in a letter to Mr Henry
James:--'Do you know the story of the man who found a button in his
hash, and called the waiter? "What do you call that?" says he.
"Well," said the waiter, "what d'you expect? Expect to find a gold
watch and chain?" Heavenly apologue, is it not?' Heavenly, by all
means; but I think Stevenson relished the humour of it so much that he
'smiling passed the moral by.' In his enjoyment of the waiter's
effrontery, he forgot to sympathise with the man (even though it was
himself) who had broken his teeth upon the harmful, unnecessary
button. He forgot t