the Seven Gables_, gives sunshine to poor Hepzibah
Clifford, but is herself never merry again, though joyousness was her
natural element. So, doubtless, it would have been with Pansie in
_Doctor Dolliver_, as indeed it was with Zenobia and with the hero in the
_Marble Faun_. "We all go wrong," said Hawthorne, "by a too strenuous
resolution to go right." Lady Byron was to him an intolerably
irreproachable person, just as Stevenson felt a little of the same
towards Thoreau; notwithstanding that he was the "sunnily-ascetic," the
asceticism and its corollary, as he puts it: the passion for individual
self-improvement was alien in a way to Stevenson. This is the position
of the casuistic mystic moralist and not of the man who sees only the
visible world.

Mr Baildon says:

"Stevenson has many of the things that are wanting or defective in
Scott. He has his philosophy of life; he is beyond remedy a moralist,
even when his morality is of the kind which he happily calls 'tail
foremost,' or as we may say, inverted morality. Stevenson is, in
fact, much more of a thinker than Scott, and he is also much more of
the conscious artist, questionable advantage as that sometimes is. He
has also a much cleverer, acuter mind than Scott, also a questionable
advantage, as genius has no greater enemy than cleverness, and there
is really no greater descent than to fall from the style of genius to
that of cleverness. But Stevenson was too critical and alive to
misuse his cleverness, and it is generally employed with great effect
as in the diabolical ingenuities of a John Silver, or a Master of
Ballantrae. In one sense Stevenson does not even belong to the school
of Scott, but rather to that of Poe, Hawthorne, and the Brontes, in
that he aims more at concentration and intensity, than at the easy,
quiet breadth of Scott."

If, indeed, it should not here have been added that Stevenson's theory of
life and conduct was not seldom too insistent for free creativeness, for
dramatic freedom, breadth and reality.

Now here I humbly think Mr Baldion errs about the cleverness when he
criticises Stevenson for the _faux pas_ artistically of resorting to the
piratic filibustering and the treasure-seeking at the close of _The
Master of Ballantrae_, he only tells and tells plainly how cleverness
took the place of genius there; as indeed it did in not a few
cases--certainly in some points in the Dutch