terature--unlike Homer, according to Mr Moore, he never
nods, though in the light of great literature, poor Stevenson is always
at his noddings, and more than that, in the words of Leland's Hans
Breitmann, he has "nodings on." He is poor, naked, miserable--a mere
pretender--and has no share in the makings of great literature. Mr Moore
has stripped him to the skin, and leaves him to the mercy of rain and
storm, like Lear, though Lear had a solid ground to go on in self-aid,
which Stevenson had not; he had daughters, and one of them was Cordelia,
after all. This comes of painting all boldly in black and white: Mr
Yeats is white, R. L. Stevenson is black, and I am sure neither one nor
other, because simply of their self-devotion to their art, could have
subscribed heartily to Mr Moore's black art and white art theory. Mr
Yeats is hardly the truest modern Celtic artist I take him for, if he can
fully subscribe to all this.

Mr Marriott Watson has a little unadvisedly, in my view, too like
ambition, fallen on 'tother side, and celebrated Stevenson as the master
of the horrifying. {11} He even finds the _Ebb-Tide_, and Huish, the
cockney, in it richly illustrative and grand. "There never was a more
magnificent cad in literature, and never a more foul-hearted little
ruffian. His picture glitters (!) with life, and when he curls up on the
island beach with the bullet in his body, amid the flames of the vitriol
he had intended for another, the reader's shudder conveys something also,
even (!) of regret."

And well it may! Individual taste and opinion are but individual taste
and opinion, but the _Ebb-Tide_ and the cockney I should be inclined to
cite as a specimen of Stevenson's all too facile make-believe, in which
there is too definite a machinery set agoing for horrors for the horrors
to be quite genuine. The process is often too forced with Stevenson, and
the incidents too much of the manufactured order, for the triumph of that
simplicity which is of inspiration and unassailable. Here Stevenson,
alas! all too often, _pace_ Mr Marriott Watson, treads on the skirts of
E. A. Poe, and that in his least composed and elevated artistic moments.
And though, it is true, that "genius will not follow rules laid down by
desultory critics," yet when it is averred that "this piece of work
fulfils Aristotle's definition of true tragedy, in accomplishing upon the
reader a certain purification of the emotions by means of terror and