, failure is yet inevitable, and the
more inevitable the more concentration and less of humorous by-play,
because genius itself, if it despises the general moral sentiment and
instinct for moral proportion--an ethnic reward and punishment, so to
say--is all astray, working outside the line; and this, if Mr Pinero will
kindly excuse me, is the secret of the failure of these plays, and not
want of concentration, etc., in the sense he meant, or as he has put it.

Stevenson rather affected what he called "tail-foremost morality," a kind
of inversion in the field of morals, as De Quincey mixed it up with tail-
foremost humour in _Murder as a Fine Art_, etc., etc., but for all such
perversions as these the stage is a grand test and corrector, and such
perversions, and not "remarks about morals," are most strictly prohibited
there. Perverted subtleties of the sort Stevenson in earlier times
especially much affected are not only amiss but ruinous on the stage; and
what genius itself would maybe sanction, common-sense must reject and
rigidly cut away. Final success and triumph come largely by _this_ kind
of condensation and concentration, and the stern and severe lopping off
of the indulgence of the _egotistical_ genius, which is human discipline,
and the best exponent of the doctrine of unity also. This is the
straight and the narrow way along which genius, if it walk but
faithfully, sows as it goes in the dramatic pathway all the flowers of
human passion, hope, love, terror, and triumph.

I find it advisable, if not needful, here to reinforce my own
impressions, at some points, by another quotation from Mr Baildon, if he
will allow me, in which Stevenson's dependence in certain respects on the
dream-faculty is emphasised, and to it is traced a certain tendency to a
moral callousness or indifference which is one of the things in which the
waking Stevenson transparently suffered now and then invasions from the
dream-Stevenson--the result, a kind of spot, as we may call it, on the
eye of the moral sense; it is a small spot; but we know how a very small
object held close before the eye will wholly shut out the most lovely
natural prospects, interposing distressful phantasmagoria, due to the
strained and, for the time, morbid condition of the organ itself. So, it
must be confessed, it is to a great extent here.

But listen to Mr Baildon:

"In _A Chapter on Dreams_, Stevenson confesses his indebtedness to this
still mysteriou