to throw light on
Stevenson's genius, and the obstacles he had had to contend with in
becoming a novelist eager to interpret definite times and character, than
has yet been done or even faithfully attempted. This would show at once
Stevenson's wonderful growth and the saving grace and elasticity of his
temperament and genius. Few men who have by force of native genius gone
into allegory or moralised phantasy ever depart out of that fateful and
enchanted region. They are as it were at once lost and imprisoned in it
and kept there as by a spell--the more they struggle for freedom the more
surely is the bewitching charm laid upon them--they are but like the fly
in amber. It was so with Ludwig Tieck; it was so with Nathaniel
Hawthorne; it was so with our own George MacDonald, whose professedly
real pictures of life are all informed of this phantasy, which spoils
them for what they profess to be, and yet to the discerning cannot
disguise what they really are--the attempts of a mystic poet and phantasy
writer and allegoristic moralist to walk in the ways of Anthony Trollope
or of Mrs Oliphant, and, like a stranger in a new land always looking
back (at least by a side-glance, an averted or half-averted face which
keeps him from seeing steadily and seeing whole the real world with which
now he is fain to deal), to the country from which he came.

Stevenson did largely free himself, that is his great achievement--had he
lived, we verily believe, so marked was his progress, he would have been
a great and true realist, a profound interpreter of human life and its
tragic laws and wondrous compensations--he would have shown how to make
the full retreat from fairyland without penalty of too early an escape
from it, as was the case with Thomas the Rymer of Ercildoune, and with
one other told of by him, and proved that to have been a dreamer need not
absolutely close the door to insight into the real world and to art. This
side of the subject, never even glanced at by Mr Henley or Mr Zangwill or
their _confreres_, yet demands, and will well reward the closest and most
careful attention and thought that can be given to it.

The parabolic element, with the whimsical humour and turn for paradoxical
inversion, comes out fully in such a work as _Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_.
There his humour gives body to his fancy, and reality to the
half-whimsical forms in which he embodies the results of deep and earnest
speculations on human nature and