ld man like the son, bore on him
the marks of early excesses of wistful self-questionings and painful
wrestlings with religious problems, that perpetuated themselves in a
quaint kind of self-revelation often masked by an assumed self-withdrawal
or indifference which to the keen eye only the more revealed the real
case. Stevenson never, any more than his father, ceased to be interested
in the religious questions for which Scotland has always had a
_penchant_--and so much is this the case that I could wish Professor
Sidney Colvin would even yet attempt to show the bearing of certain
things in that _Address to the Scottish Clergy_ written when Stevenson
was yet but a young man, on all that he afterwards said and did. It
starts in the _Edinburgh Edition_ without any note, comment, or
explanation whatever, but in that respect the _Edinburgh Edition_ is not
quite so complete as it might have been made. In view of the point now
before us, it is far more important than many of the other trifles there
given, and wants explanation and its relation to much in the novels
brought out and illustrated. Were this adequately done, only new ground
would be got for holding that Stevenson, instead of, as has been said,
"seeing only the visible world," was, in truth, a mystical moralist, once
and always, whose thoughts ran all too easily into parable and fable, and
who, indeed, never escaped wholly from that atmosphere, even when writing
of things and characters that seemed of themselves to be wholly outside
that sphere. This was the tendency, indeed, that militated against the
complete detachment in his case from moral problems and mystical thought,
so as to enable him to paint, as it were, with a free hand exactly as he
saw; and most certainly not that he saw only the visible world. The
mystical element is not directly favourable to creative art. You see in
Tolstoy how it arrests and perplexes--how it lays a disturbing check on
real presentation--hindering the action, and is not favourable to the
loving and faithful representation, which, as Goethe said, all true and
high art should be. To some extent you see exactly the same thing in
Nathaniel Hawthorne as in Tolstoy. Hawthorne's preoccupations in this
way militated against his character-power; his healthy characters who
would never have been influenced as he describes by morbid ones yet are
not only influenced according to him, but suffer sadly. Phoebe Pyncheon
in _The House of