ved it. And his morality, though
(or inasmuch as) it dwelt more on positive kindness than on negative
lawlessness, was, as he often insisted, very much akin to the morality
of the New Testament."

Anyway it is clear that much in the interminglings of blood we _can_
trace, may go to account for not a little in Stevenson. His peculiar
interest in the enormities of old-time feuds, the excesses, the
jealousies, the queer psychological puzzles, the desire to work on the
outlying and morbid, and even the unallowed and unhallowed, for purposes
of romance--the delight in dealing with revelations of primitive feeling
and the out-bursts of the mere natural man always strangely checked and
diverted by the uprise of other tendencies to the dreamy, impalpable,
vague, weird and horrible. There was the undoubted Celtic element in him
underlying what seemed foreign to it, the disregard of conventionality in
one phase, and the falling under it in another--the reaction and the
retreat from what had attracted and interested him, and then the return
upon it, as with added zest because of the retreat. The confessed
Hedonist, enjoying life and boasting of it just a little, and yet the
Puritan in him, as it were, all the time eyeing himself as from some
loophole of retreat, and then commenting on his own behaviour as a
Hedonist and Bohemian. This clearly was not what most struck Beerbohm
Tree, during the time he was in close contact with Stevenson, while
arranging the production of _Beau Austin_ at the Haymarket Theatre, for
he sees, or confesses to seeing, only one side, and that the most
assertive, and in a sense, unreal one:

"Stevenson," says Mr Tree, "always seemed to me an epicure in life. He
was always intent on extracting the last drop of honey from every
flower that came in his way. He was absorbed in the business of the
moment, however trivial. As a companion, he was delightfully witty;
as a personality, as much a creature of romance as his own creations."

This is simple, and it looks sincere; but it does not touch 'tother side,
or hint at, not to say, solve the problem of Stevenson's personality. Had
he been the mere Hedonist he could never have done the work he did. Mr
Beerbohm Tree certainly did not there see far or all round.

Miss Simpson says:

"Mr Henley recalls him to Edinburgh folk as he was and as the true
Stevenson would have wished to be known--a queer, inexplicable
creatu