tries to ignore it; he is a
monster if he is wholly blind to it--like the poet in _In Memoriam_,
"Without a conscience or an aim." Mr Henley, in his notorious, all too
confessional, and yet rather affected article on Stevenson in the _Pall
Mall Magazine_, has a remark which I confess astonished me--a remark I
could never forget as coming from him. He said that he "had lived a very
full and varied life, and had no interest in remarks about morals."
"Remarks about morals" are, nevertheless, in essence, the pith of all the
books to which he referred, as those to which he turned in preference to
the _Edinburgh Edition_ of R. L. Stevenson's works. The moral element is
implicit in the drama, and it is implicit there because it is implicit in
life itself, or so the great common-sense conceives it and demands it.
What we might call the asides proper of the drama, are "remarks about
morals," nothing else--the chorus in the Greek tragedy gathered up
"remarks about morals" as near as might be to the "remarks about morals"
in the streets of that day, only shaped to a certain artistic
consistency. Shakespeare is rich in "remarks about morals," often coming
near, indeed, to personal utterance, and this not only when Polonius
addresses his son before his going forth on his travels. Mr Henley here
only too plainly confessed, indeed, to lack of that conviction and
insight which, had he but possessed them, might have done a little to
relieve _Beau Austin_ and the other plays in which he collaborated with
R. L. Stevenson, from their besetting and fatal weakness. The two
youths, alas! thought they could be grandly original by despising, or
worse, contemning "remarks about morals" in the loftier as in the lower
sense. To "live a full and varied life," if the experience derived from
it is to have expression in the drama, is only to have the richer
resource in "remarks about morals." If this is perverted under any self-
conscious notion of doing something spick-and-span new in the way of
character and plot, alien to all the old conceptions, then we know our
writers set themselves boldly at loggerheads with certain old-fashioned
and yet older new-fashioned laws, which forbid the violation of certain
common demands of the ordinary nature and common-sense; and for the lack
of this, as said already, no cleverness, no resource, no style or graft,
will any way make up. So long as this is tried, with whatever
concentration of mind and purpose