t of his sympathy, and said, 'Will you let me play with you?'
'Go to hell!' said the democratic offspring of the baker. This lesson
against doing good by stealth to persons of unknown or hostile
disposition was, it seems, thrown away. Such endeavours are apt to be
misconstrued."

CHAPTER XXVIII--UNEXPECTED COMBINATIONS

The complete artist should not be mystical-moralist any more than the man
who "perceives only the visible world"--he should not engage himself with
problems in the direct sense any more than he should blind himself to
their effect upon others, whom he should study, and under certain
conditions represent, though he should not commit himself to any form of
zealot faith, yet should he not be, as Lord Tennyson puts it in the
Palace of Art:

"As God holding no form of creed,
But contemplating all,"

because his power lies in the broadness of his humanity touched to fine
issues whenever there is the seal at once of truth, reality, and passion,
and the tragedy bred of their contact and conflict.

All these things are to him real and clamant in the measure that they aid
appeal to heart and emotion--in the measure that they may, in his hands,
be made to tell for sympathy and general effect. He creates an
atmosphere in which each and all may be seen the more effectively, but
never seen alone or separate, but only in strict relation to each other
that they may heighten the sense of some supreme controlling power in the
destinies of men, which with the ancients was figured as Fate, and for
which the moderns have hardly yet found an enduring and exhaustive name.
Character revealed in reference to that, is the ideal and the aim of all
high creative art. Stevenson's narrowness, allied to a quaint and
occasionally just a wee pedantic finickiness, as we may call it--an over-
elaborate, almost tricky play with mere words and phrases, was in so far
alien to the very highest--he was too often like a man magnetised and
moving at the dictates of some outside influence rather than according to
his own freewill and as he would.

Action in creative literary art is a _sine qua non_; keeping all the
characters and parts in unison, that a true _denouement_, determined by
their own tendencies and temperaments, may appear; dialogue and all
asides, if we may call them so, being supererogatory and weak really
unless they aid this and are constantly contributory to it. Egotistical
predeterminations,