t in one passage of his _Vailima Letters_ 'the
ever-to-be-execrated _Ebb-Tide_' (pp. 178 and 184). . . . He repented
of it like a debauch, and, as with some men after a debauch, felt
cleared and strengthened instead of wrecked. So, after what in one
sense was his lowest plunge, Stevenson rose to the greatest height.
That is the tribute to his virtue and strength indeed, but it does not
change the character of the _Ebb-Tide_ as 'the ever-to-be-execrated.'"

Mr Baildon truly says (p. 49):

"The curious point is that Stevenson's own great fault, that tendency
to what has been called the 'Twopence-coloured' style, is always at
its worst in books over which he collaborated."

"Verax," in one of his "Occasional Papers" in the _Daily News_ on "The
Average Reader" has this passage:

"We should not object to a writer who could repeat Barrie in _A Window
in Thrums_, nor to one who would paint a scene as Louis Stevenson
paints Attwater alone on his South Sea island, the approach of the
pirates to the harbour, and their subsequent reception and fate. All
these are surely specimens of brilliant writing, and they are
brilliant because, in the first place, they give truth. The events
described must, in the supposed circumstances, and with the given
characters, have happened in the way stated. Only in none of the
specimens have we a mere photograph of the outside of what took place.
We have great pictures by genius of the--to the prosaic eye--invisible
realities, as well as of the outward form of the actions. We behold
and are made to feel the solemnity, the wildness, the pathos, the
earnestness, the agony, the pity, the moral squalor, the grotesque
fun, the delicate and minute beauty, the natural loveliness and
loneliness, the quiet desperate bravery, or whatever else any of these
wonderful pictures disclose to our view. Had we been lookers-on, we,
the average readers, could not have seen these qualities for
ourselves. But they are there, and genius enables us to see them.
Genius makes truth shine.

"Is it not, therefore, probable that the brilliancy which we average
readers do not want, and only laugh at when we get it, is something
altogether different? I think I know what it is. It is an attempt to
describe with words without thoughts, an effort to make readers see
something the writer has never seen himself in his mind'