s he sees them; nay, the hand, when he deems himself freest,
will be laid upon him from behind, if not to pull him, as MacDonald has
said, into life backward, then to make him a mournful witness of having
once been touched by the Marah-rod, whose bitterness again declares
itself and wells out its bitterness when set even in the rising and the
stirring of the waters.

Such is our view of the "gloom" of Stevenson--a gloom which well might
have justified something of his father's despondency. He struggles in
vain to escape from it--it narrows, it fatefully hampers and limits the
free field of his art, lays upon it a strange atmosphere, fascinating,
but not favourable to true dramatic breadth and force, and spontaneous
natural simplicity, invariably lending a certain touch of weakness,
inconsistency, and inconclusiveness to his endings; so that he himself
could too often speak of them afterwards as apt to "shame, perhaps to
degrade, the beginnings." This is what true dramatic art should never
do. In the ending all that may raise legitimate question in the
process--all that is confusing, perplexing in the separate parts--is met,
solved, reconciled, at least in a way satisfactory to the general, or
ordinary mind; and thus such unity is by it so gained and sealed, that in
no case can the true artist, whatever faults may lie in portions of the
process-work, say of his endings that "they shame, perhaps degrade, the
beginning." Wherever this is the case there will be "gloom," and there
will also be a sad, tormenting sense of something wanting. "The evening
brings a 'hame';" so should it be here--should it especially be in a
dramatic work. If not, "We start; for soul is wanting there;" or, if not
soul, then the last halo of the soul's serene triumph. From this side,
too, there is another cause for the undramatic character, in the stricter
sense of Stevenson's work generally: it is, after all, distressful,
unsatisfying, egotistic, for fancy is led at the beck of some
pre-established disharmony which throws back an abiding and irremovable
gloom on all that went before; and the free spontaneous grace of natural
creation which ensures natural simplicity is, as said already, not quite
attained.

It was well pointed out in _Hammerton_, by an unanonymous author there
quoted (pp. 22, 23), that while in the story, Hyde, the worse one, wins,
in Stevenson himself--in his real life--Jekyll won, and not Mr Hyde. This
writer, too, migh