behind Stevenson's latest exercises lies the shadow of this as an
unshifting background, which by art may be relieved, but never refined
away wholly. He cannot escape from it if he would. Here, too, as George
MacDonald has neatly and nicely said: We are the victims of our own past,
and often a hand is put forth upon us from behind and draws us into life
backward. Here was Stevenson, with his half-hedonistic theories of life,
the duty of giving pleasure, of making eyes brighter, and casting
sunshine around one wherever one went, yet the creator of gloom for us,
when all the world was before him where to choose. This fateful shadow
pursued him to the end, often giving us, as it were, the very
justificative ground for his own father's despondency and gloom, which
the son rather too decisively reproved, while he might have sympathised
with it in a stranger, and in that most characteristic letter to his
mother, which we have quoted, said that it made his father often seem, to
him, to be ungrateful--"_Has the man no gratitude_?" Two selves thus
persistently and constantly struggled in Stevenson. He was from this
point of view, indeed, his own Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the buoyant, self-
enjoying, because pleasure-conferring, man, and at the same time the
helpless yet fascinating "dark interpreter" of the gloomy and
gloom-inspiring side of life, viewed from the point of view of dominating
character and inherited influence. When he reached out his hand with
desire of pleasure-conferring, lo and behold, as he wrote, a hand from
his forefathers was stretched out, and he was pulled backward; so that,
as he has confessed, his endings were apt to shame, perhaps to degrade,
the beginnings. Here is something pointing to the hidden and secret
springs that feed the deeper will and bend it to their service.
Individuality itself is but a mirror, which by its inequalities
transforms things to odd shapes. Hawthorne confessed to something of
this sort. He, like Stevenson, suffered much in youth, if not from
disease then through accident, which kept him long from youthful company.
At a time when he should have been running free with other boys, he had
to be lonely, reading what books he could lay his hands on, mostly
mournful and puritanic, by the borders of lone Sebago Lake. He that hath
once in youth been touched by this Marah-rod of bitterness will not
easily escape from it, when he essays in later years to paint life and
the world a