son's tales of blood
and spoil; he appears to think that they prove Stevenson to have had (we
use Mr Baildon's own phrase) a kind of 'homicidal mania.' 'He
(Stevenson) arrives pretty much at the paradox that one can hardly be
better employed than in taking life.' Mr Baildon might as well say that
Dr Conan Doyle delights in committing inexplicable crimes, that Mr Clark
Russell is a notorious pirate, and that Mr Wilkie Collins thought that
one could hardly be better employed than in stealing moonstones and
falsifying marriage registers. But Mr Baildon is scarcely alone in this
error: few people have understood properly the goriness of Stevenson.
Stevenson was essentially the robust schoolboy who draws skeletons and
gibbets in his Latin grammar. It was not that he took pleasure in death,
but that he took pleasure in life, in every muscular and emphatic action
of life, even if it were an action that took the life of another.

Let us suppose that one gentleman throws a knife at another gentleman
and pins him to the wall. It is scarcely necessary to remark that there
are in this transaction two somewhat varying personal points of view.
The point of view of the man pinned is the tragic and moral point of
view, and this Stevenson showed clearly that he understood in such
stories as 'The Master of Ballantrae' and 'Weir of Hermiston.' But there
is another view of the matter--that in which the whole act is an abrupt
and brilliant explosion of bodily vitality, like breaking a rock with a
blow of a hammer, or just clearing a five-barred gate. This is the
standpoint of romance, and it is the soul of 'Treasure Island' and 'The
Wrecker.' It was not, indeed, that Stevenson loved men less, but that he
loved clubs and pistols more. He had, in truth, in the devouring
universalism of his soul, a positive love for inanimate objects such as
has not been known since St Francis called the sun brother and the well
sister. We feel that he was actually in love with the wooden crutch
that Silver sent hurtling in the sunlight, with the box that Billy Bones
left at the 'Admiral Benbow,' with the knife that Wicks drove through
his own hand and the table. There is always in his work a certain
clean-cut angularity which makes us remember that he was fond of cutting
wood with an axe.

Stevenson's new biographer, however, cannot make any allowance for this
deep-rooted poetry of mere sight and touch. He is always imputing
something to Stevenson as a crime