pity," expectations will be raised in many of the new generation, doomed
in the cases of the more sensitive and discerning, at all events, not to
be gratified. There is a distinction, very bold and very essential,
between melodrama, however carefully worked and staged, and that tragedy
to which Aristotle was there referring. Stevenson's "horrifying," to my
mind, too often touches the trying borders of melodrama, and nowhere more
so than in the very forced and unequal _Ebb-Tide_, which, with its rather
doubtful moral and forced incident when it is good, seems merely to
borrow from what had gone before, if not a very little even from some of
what came after. No service is done to an author like Stevenson by
fatefully praising him for precisely the wrong thing.

"Romance attracted Stevenson, at least during the earlier part of his
life, as a lodestone attracts the magnet. To romance he brought the
highest gifts, and he has left us not only essays of delicate humour"
(should this not be "essays _full of_" _or_ "characterised by"?) "and
sensitive imagination, but stories also which thrill with the
realities of life, which are faithful pictures of the times and
tempers he dealt with, and which, I firmly believe, will live so"
(should it not be "as"?) "long as our noble English language."

Mr Marriott Watson sees very clearly in some things; but occasionally he
misses the point. The problem is here raised how two honest, far-seeing
critics could see so very differently on so simple a subject.

Mr Baildon says about the _Ebb-Tide_:

"I can compare his next book, the _Ebb-Tide_ (in collaboration with
Osbourne) to little better than a mud-bath, for we find ourselves, as
it were, unrelieved by dredging among the scum and dregs of humanity,
the 'white trash' of the Pacific. Here we have Stevenson's masterly
but utterly revolting incarnation of the lowest, vilest, vulgarest
villainy in the cockney, Huish. Stevenson's other villains shock us
by their cruel and wicked conduct; but there is a kind of fallen
satanic glory about them, some shining threads of possible virtue.
They might have been good, even great in goodness, but for the malady
of not wanting. But Huish is a creature hatched in slime, his soul
has no true humanity: it is squat and toad-like, and can only spit
venom. . . . He himself felt a sort of revulsive after-sickness for
the story, and calls i