ng but the gloomy side, nothing but the weakness
of good, nothing but the strength of evil, does not inspire us to
contend for the right, does not inform us of the powers and weapons
with which we might so contend. To gaze at unqualified and inevitable
moral defeat will but leave us to the still worse laziness of
pessimism, uttering its discouraging and blasphemous cry, 'It does not
matter; nothing will ever come right!'

"Shakespeare has shown us--and never so nobly as in his last great
creation of _The Tempest_--that a man has one stronghold which none
but himself can deliver over to the enemy--that citadel of his own
conduct and character, from which he can smile supreme upon the foe,
who may have conquered all down the line, but must finally make pause
there.

"We must remember that _The Tempest_ was Shakespeare's last work. The
genuine consciousness of the possible triumph of the moral nature
against every assault is probably reserved for the later years of
life, when, somewhat withdrawn from the passions of its struggle, we
become those lookers-on who see most of the game. Strange fate is it
that so much of our genius vanishes into the great silence before
those later years are reached!"

Stevenson was too late in awakening fully to the tragic error to which
short-sighted youth is apt to wander that "bad-heartedness is strength."
And so, from this point of view, to our sorrow, he too much verified
Goethe's saw that "simplicity (not artifice) and repose are the acme of
art, and therefore no youth can be a master." In fact, he might very
well from another side, have taken one of Goethe's fine sayings as a
motto for himself:

"Greatest saints were ever most kindly-hearted to sinners;
Here I'm a saint with the best; sinners I never could hate." {7}

Stevenson's own verdict on _Deacon Brodie_ given to a _New York Herald_
reporter on the author's arrival in New York in September 1887, on the
_Ludgate Hill_, is thus very near the precise truth: "The piece has been
all overhauled, and though I have no idea whether it will please an
audience, I don't think either Mr Henley or I are ashamed of it. _But we
were both young men when we did that_, _and I think we had an idea that
bad-heartedness was strength_."

If Mr Henley in any way confirmed R. L. Stevenson in this perversion, as
I much fear he did, no true admirer of Stevenson has much to thank him