hand that everyone
supposed they must be copy-book sentiments. He suffered from his
versatility, not, as is loosely said, by not doing every department well
enough, but by doing every department too well. As child, cockney,
pirate, or Puritan, his disguises were so good that most people could
not see the same man under all. It is an unjust fact that if a man can
play the fiddle, give legal opinions, and black boots just tolerably, he
is called an Admirable Crichton, but if he does all three thoroughly
well, he is apt to be regarded, in the several departments, as a common
fiddler, a common lawyer, and a common boot-black. This is what has
happened in the case of Stevenson. If "Dr. Jekyll," "The Master of
Ballantrae," "The Child's Garden of Verses," and "Across the Plains" had
been each of them one shade less perfectly done than they were, everyone
would have seen that they were all parts of the same message; but by
succeeding in the proverbial miracle of being in five places at once, he
has naturally convinced others that he was five different people. But
the real message of Stevenson was as simple as that of Mohamet, as moral
as that of Dante, as confident as that of Whitman, and as practical as
that of James Watt. The conception which unites the whole varied work of
Stevenson was that romance, or the vision of the possibilities of
things, was far more important than mere occurrences: that one was the
soul of our life, the other the body, and that the soul was the precious
thing. The germ of all his stories lies in the idea that every landscape
or scrap of scenery has a soul: and that soul is a story. Standing
before a stunted orchard with a broken stone wall, we may know as a
mere fact that no one has been through it but an elderly female cook.
But everything exists in the human soul: that orchard grows in our own
brain, and there it is the shrine and theatre of some strange chance
between a girl and a ragged poet and a mad farmer. Stevenson stands for
the conception that ideas are the real incidents: that our fancies are
our adventures. To think of a cow with wings is essentially to have met
one. And this is the reason for his wide diversities of narrative: he
had to make one story as rich as a ruby sunset, another as grey as a
hoary monolith: for the story was the soul, or rather the meaning, of
the bodily vision. It is quite inappropriate to judge "The Teller of
Tales" (as the Samoans called him) by the particular n