it been His wull," indicating Heaven, "I wad hae likeit weel to hae
made oot the fower hunner." That took Stevenson. Listen to what

Mr Edmond Gosse tells of his talk, when he found him in a private
hotel in Finsbury Circus, London, ready to be put on board a

steamer for America, on 21st August, 1887:
"It was church time, and there was some talk of my witnessing his

will, which I could not do because there could be found no other
reputable witness, the whole crew of the hotel being at church.

'This,' he said, 'is the way in which our valuable city hotels -
packed no doubt with gems and jewellery - are deserted on a Sunday

morning. Some bold piratical fellow, defying the spirit of
Sabbatarianism, might make a handsome revenue by sacking the

derelict hotels between the hours of ten and twelve. One hotel a
week would enable such a man to retire in course of a year. A mask

might perhaps be worn for the mere fancy of the thing, and to
terrify kitchen-maids, but no real disguise would be needful.'"

I would rather agree with Mr Chesterton than with Mr Zangwill here:
"Stevenson's enormouscapacity for joy flowed directly out of his

profoundly religious temperament" target="_blank" title="n.气质；性格">temperament. He conceived himself as an
unimportant guest at one eternal and uproarious banquet, and

instead of grumbling at the soup, he accepted it with careless
gratitude. . . . His gaiety was neither the gaiety of the pagan,

nor the gaiety of the BON VIVANT. It was the greater gaiety of the
mystic. He could enjoy trifles because there was to him no such

thing as a trifle. He was a child who respected his dolls because
they were the images of the image of God, portraits at only two

removes."
Here, then, we have the child crossed by the dreamer and the

mystic, bred of Calvinism and speculation on human fate and chance,
and on the mystery of temperament" target="_blank" title="n.气质；性格">temperament and inheritance, and all that

flows from these - reprobation, with its dire shadows, assured
Election with its joys, etc., etc.

3. If such a combination is in favour of the story-teller up to a
certain point, it is not favourable to the highest flights, and it

is alien to dramaticpresentation pure and simple. This implies
detachment from moods and characters, high as well as low, that

complete justice in presentation may be done to all alike, and the
one balance that obtains in life grasped and repeated with

emphasis. But towards his leading characters Stevenson is
unconsciously biassed, because they are more or less shadowy

projections of himself, or images through which he would reveal one
or other side or aspect of his own personality. Attwater is a

confessed failure, because it, more than any other, testifies this:
he is but a mouth-piece for one side or tendency in Stevenson. If

the same thing is not more decisively felt in some other cases, it
is because Stevenson there showed the better art o' hidin', and not

because he was any more truly detached or dramatic. "Of Hamlet
most of all," wrote Henley in his sonnet. The Hamlet in Stevenson

- the self-questioning, egotistic, moralising Hamlet - was, and to
the end remained, a something alien to bold, dramatic, creative

freedom. He is great as an artist, as a man bent on giving to all
that he did the best and most distinguished form possible, but not

great as a free creator of dramatic power. "Mother," he said as a
mere child, "I've drawed a man. Now, will I draw his soul?" He

was to the end all too fond to essay a picture of the soul,
separate and peculiar. All the Jekyll and Hyde and even Ballantrae

conceptions came out of that - and what is more, he always mixed
his own soul with the other soul, and could not help doing so.

4. When; therefore, I find Mr Pinero, in lecturing at Edinburgh,
deciding in favour of Stevenson as possessed of rare dramatic

power, and wondering why he did not more effectively employ it, I
can't agree with him; and this because of the presence of a certain

atmosphere in the novels, alien to free play of the individualities
presented. Like Hawthorne's, like the works of our great

symbolists, they are restricted by a sense of some obtaining
conception, some weird metaphysical WEIRD or preconception. This

is the ground "Ian MacLaren" has for saying that "his kinship is
not with Boccaccio and Rabelais, but with Dante and Spenser" - the

ground for many remarks by critics to the effect that they still
crave from him "less symbol and more individuality" - the ground

for the Rev. W. J. Dawson's remark that "he has a powerful and
persistent sense of the spiritual forces which move behind the

painted shows of life; that he writes not only as a realist but as
a prophet, his meanest stage being set with eternity as a

background."
Such expressions are fullest justification for what we have here

said: it adds, and can only add, to our admiration of Stevenson,
as a thinker, seer, or mystic, but the asserting sense of such

power can only end in lessening the height to which he could attain
as a dramatic artist; and there is much indeed against Mr Pinero's

own view that, in the dramas, he finds that "fine speeches" are
ruinous to them as acting plays. In the strict sense overfine

speeches are yet almost everywhere. David Balfour could never have
writ some speeches attributed to him - they are just R. L.

Stevenson with a very superficial difference that, when once
detected, renders them curious and quaint and interesting, but not

dramatic.
CHAPTER XIII - PREACHER AND MYSTIC FABULIST

IN reality, Stevenson is always directly or indirectlypreaching" target="_blank" title="n.说教 a.说教的">preaching a
sermon - enforcing a moral - as though he could not help it. "He

would rise from the dead to preach a sermon." He wrote some first-
rate fables, and might indeed have figured to effect as a moralist-

fabulist, as truly he was from beginning to end. There was a bit
of Bunyan in him as well as of Aesop and Rousseau and Thoreau - the

mixture that found coherency in his most peculiarly patient and
forbearing temper is what gives at once the quaintness, the

freedom, and yet the odd didactic something that is never wanting.
I remember a fable about the Devil that might well be brought in to

illustrate this here - careful readers who neglect nothing that
Stevenson wrote will remember it also and perhaps bear me out here.

But for the sake of the young folks who may yet have some leeway to
make up, I shall indulge myself a little by quoting it: and, since

I am on that tack, follow it by another which presents Stevenson in
his favourite guise of quizzing his own characters, if not for his

own advantage certainly for ours, if we would in the least
understand the fine moralist-casuistical qualities of his mind and

fancy:
THE DEVIL AND THE INNKEEPER

Once upon a time the devil stayed at an inn, where no one knew him,
for they were people whose education had been neglected. He was

bent on mischief, and for a time kept everybody by the ears. But
at last the innkeeper set a watch upon the devil and took him in

the act.
The innkeeper got a rope's end.

"Now I am going to thrash you," said the inn-keeper.
"You have no right to be angry with me," said the devil. "I am

only the devil, and it is my nature to do wrong."
"Is that so?" asked the innkeeper.

"Fact, I assure you," said the devil.
"You really cannot help doing ill?" asked the innkeeper.

"Not in the smallest," said the devil, "it would be useless cruelty
to thrash a thing like me."

"It would indeed," said the innkeeper.
And he made a noose and hanged the devil.

"There!" said the innkeeper.
The deeper Stevenson goes, the more happily is he inspired. We

could scarcely cite anything more Stevensonian, alike in its humour
and its philosophy, than the dialogue between Captain Smollett and

Long John Silver, entitled THE PERSONS OF THE TALE. After chapter
xxxii. of TREASURE ISLAND, these two puppets "strolled out to have