Hermiston_ we have the passage
from mere youth to manhood, with its wider, calmer views, and its
patience, inclusiveness, and mild, genial acceptance of types that before
did not come, and could not by any effort of will be brought, within
range or made to adhere consistently with what was already accepted and
workable. He was less the egotist now and more the realist. He was not
so prone to the high lights in which all seems overwrought, exaggerated;
concerned really with effects of a more subdued order, if still the theme
was a wee out of ordinary nature. Enough is left to prove that
Stevenson's life-long devotion to his art anyway was on the point of
being rewarded by such a success as he had always dreamt of: that in the
man's nature there was power to conceive scenes of a tragic beauty and
intensity unsurpassed in our prose literature, and to create characters
not unworthy of his greatest predecessors. The blind stroke of fate had
nothing to say to the lesson of his life, and though we deplore that he
never completed his masterpieces, we may at least be thankful that time
enough was given him to prove to his fellow-craftsmen, that such labour
for the sake of art is not without art's peculiar reward--the triumph of
successful execution.

CHAPTER XXIII--EDINBURGH REVIEWERS' DICTA INAPPLICABLE TO LATER WORK

From many different points of view discerning critics have celebrated the
autobiographic vein--the self-revealing turn, the self-portraiture, the
quaint, genial, yet really child-like egotistic and even dreamy element
that lies like an amalgam, behind all Stevenson's work. Some have even
said, that because of this, he will finally live by his essays and not by
his stories. That is extreme, and is not critically based or justified,
because, however true it may be up to a certain point, it is not true of
Stevenson's quite latest fictions where we see a decided breaking through
of the old limits, and an advance upon a new and a fresher and broader
sphere of interest and character altogether. But these ideas set down
truly enough at a certain date, or prior to a certain date, are wrong and
falsely directed in view of Stevenson's latest work and what it promised.
For instance, what a discerning and able writer in the _Edinburgh Review_
of July 1895 said truly then was in great part utterly inapplicable to
the whole of the work of the last years, for in it there was grasp, wide
and deep, of new possibili