for, whatever claims he may have fancied he had to Stevenson's eternal
gratitude. He did Stevenson about the very worst turn he could have
done, and aided and abetted in robbing us and the world of yet greater
works than we have had from his hands. He was but condemning himself
when he wrote some of the detractory things he did in the _Pall Mall
Magazine_ about the _Edinburgh Edition_, etc. Men are mirrors in which
they see each other: Henley, after all, painted himself much more
effectively in that now notorious _Pall Mall Magazine_ article than he
did R. L. Stevenson. Such is the penalty men too often pay for wreaking
paltry revenges--writing under morbid memories and narrow and petty
grievances--they not only fail in truth and impartiality, but inscribe a
kind of grotesque parody of themselves in their effort to make their
subject ridiculous, as he did, for example, about the name Lewis=Louis,
and various other things.

R. L. Stevenson's fate was to be a casuistic and mystic moralist at
bottom, and could not help it; while, owing to some kink or twist, due,
perhaps, mainly to his earlier sufferings, and the teachings he then
received, he could not help giving it always a turn to what he himself
called "tail-foremost" or inverted morality; and it was not till near the
close that he fully awakened to the fact that here he was false to the
truest canons at once of morality and life and art, and that if he
pursued this course his doom was, and would be, to make his endings
"disgrace, or perhaps, degrade his beginnings," and that no true and
effective dramatic unity and effect and climax was to be gained. Pity
that he did so much on this perverted view of life and world and art: and
well it is that he came to perceive it, even though almost too
late:--certainly too late for that full presentment of that awful yet
gladdening presence of a God's power and equity in this seeming tangled
web of a world, the idea which inspired Robert Browning as well as
Wordsworth, when he wrote, and gathered it up into a few lines in _Pippa
Passes_:

"The year's at the spring,
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hillsides dew-pearled;

The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn:
God's in His heaven,
All's right with the world.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

"All service ranks the same with God,
If now, as formerly he trod
Paradise, His presence fills
Our earth, each only as G