adventures, I can feel any very livelyaffection or antipathy."

In the EBB-TIDE it is, in this respect, yet worse: the three
heroes choke each other off all too literally.

In his excess of impartiality he tones down the points and lines
that would give the attraction of true individuality to his

characters, and instead, would fain have us contented with his
liberal, and even over-sympathetic views of them and allowances for

them. But instead of thus furthering his object, he sacrifices the
whole - and his story becomes, instead of a broad and faithful

human record, really a curiosity of autobiographic perversion, and
of overweening, if not extravagant egotism of the more refined, but

yet over-obtrusive kind.
Mr Baildon thus hits the subjective tendency, out of which mainly

this defect - a serious defect in view of interest - arises.
"That we can none of us be sure to what crime we might not descend,

if only our temptation were sufficiently acute, lies at the root of
his fondness and toleration for wrong-doers (p. 74).

Thus he practically declines to do for us what we are unwilling or
unable to do for ourselves. Interest in two characters in fiction

can never, in this artificial way, and if they are real characters
truly conceived, be made equal, nor can one element of claim be

balanced against another, even at the beck of the greatest artist.
The common sentiment, as we have seen, resents it even as it

resents lack of guidanceelsewhere. After all, the novelist is
bound to give guidance: he is an authority in his own world, where

he is an autocrat indeed; and can work out issues as he pleases,
even as the Pope is an authority in the Roman Catholic world: he

abdicates his functions when he declines to lead: we depend on him
from the human point of view to guide us right, according to the

heart, if not according to any conventional notion or opinion.
Stevenson's pause in individual presentation in the desire now to

raise our sympathy for the one, and then for the other in THE
MASTER OF BALLANTRAE, admits us too far into Stevenson's secret or

trick of affected self-withdrawal in order to work his problem and
to signify his theories, to the loss and utter confusion of his

aims from the point of common dramatic and human interest. It is
the same in CATRIONA in much of the treatment of James Mohr or

More; it is still more so in not a little of the treatment of WEIR
OF HERMISTON and his son, though there, happily for him and for us,

there were the direct restrictions of known fact and history, and
clearly an attempt at a truer and broader human conception

unburdened by theory or egotistic conception.
Everywhere the problem due to the desire to be overjust, so to say,

emerges; and exactly in the measure it does so the source of true
dramatic directness and variety is lost. It is just as though

Shakespeare were to invent a chorus to cry out at intervals about
Iago - "a villain, bad lot, you see, still there's a great deal to

be said for him - victim of inheritance, this, that and the other;
and considering everything how could you really expect anything

else now." Thackeray was often weak from this same tendency - he
meant Becky Sharp to be largely excused by the reader on these

grounds, as he tries to excuse several others of his characters;
but his endeavours in this way to gloss over "wickedness" in a way,

do not succeed - the reader does not carry clear in mind as he goes
along, the suggestions Thackeray has ineffectually set out and the

"healthyhatred of scoundrels" Carlyle talked about has its full
play in spite of Thackeray's suggested excuses and palliations, and

all in his own favour, too, as a story-wright.
Stevenson's constant habit of putting himself in the place of

another, and asking himself how would I have borne myself here or
there, thus limited his field of dramatic interest, where the

subject should have been made pre-eminently in aid of this effect.
Even in Long John Silver we see it, as in various others of his

characters, though there, owing to the demand for adventure, and
action contributory to it, the defect is not so emphasised. The

sense as of a projection of certain features of the writer into all
and sundry of his important characters, thus imparts, if not an air

of egotism, then most certainly a somewhat constrained, if not
somewhat artificial, autobiographical air - in the very midst of

action, questions of ethical or casuistical character arise, all
contributing to submerging individual character and its dramatic

interests under a wave of but half-disguised autobiography. Let
Stevenson do his very best - let him adopt all the artificial

disguises he may, as writingnarrative in the first person, etc.,
as in KIDNAPPED and CATRIONA, nevertheless, the attentive reader's

mind is constantly called off to the man who is actuallywriting
the story. It is as though, after all, all the artistic or

artificial disguises were a mere mask, as more than once Thackeray
represented himself, the mask partially moved aside, just enough to

show a chubby, childish kind of transformed Thackeray face below.
This belongs, after all, to the order of self-revelation though

under many disguises: it is creation only in its manner of work,
not in its essential being - the spirit does not so to us go clean

forth of itself, it stops at home, and, as if from a remote and
shadowy cave or recess, projects its own colour on all on which it

looks.
This is essentially the character of the MYSTIC; and hence the

justification for this word as appliedexpressly to Stevenson by Mr
Chesterton and others.

"The inner life like rings of light
Goes forth of us, transfiguring all we see."

The effect of these early days, with the peculiar tint due to the
questionings raised by religious stress and strain, persists with

Stevenson; he grows, but he never escapes from that peculiar
something which tells of childish influences - of boyish

perversions and troubled self-examinations due to Shorter Catechism
- any one who would view Stevenson without thought of this, would

view him only from the outside - see him merely in dress and outer
oddities. Here I see definite and clear heredity. Much as he

differed from his worthy father in many things, he was like him in
this - the old man like the son, bore on him the marks of early

excesses of wistful self-questionings and painful wrestlings with
religious problems, that perpetuated themselves in a quaint kind of

self-revelation often masked by an assumed self-withdrawal or
indifference which to the keen eye only the more revealed the real

case. Stevenson never, any more than his father, ceased to be
interested in the religious questions for which Scotland has always

had a PENCHANT - and so much is this the case that I could wish
Professor Sidney Colvin would even yet attempt to show the bearing

of certain things in that ADDRESS TO THE SCOTTISH CLERGY written
when Stevenson was yet but a young man, on all that he afterwards

said and did. It starts in the EDINBURGH EDITION without any note,
comment, or explanationwhatever, but in that respect the EDINBURGH

EDITION is not quite so complete as it might have been made. In
view of the point now before us, it is far more important than many

of the other trifles there given, and wants explanation and its
relation to much in the novels brought out and illustrated. Were

this adequately done, only new ground would be got for holding that
Stevenson, instead of, as has been said, "seeing only the visible

world," was, in truth, a mystical moralist, once and always, whose
thoughts ran all too easily into parable and fable, and who,

indeed, never escaped wholly from that sphere" target="_blank" title="n.大气；空气；气氛">atmosphere, even when
writing of things and characters that seemed of themselves to be

wholly outside that sphere. This was the tendency, indeed, that
militated against the complete detachment in his case from moral

problems and mystical thought, so as to enable him to paint, as it
were, with a free hand exactly as he saw; and most certainly not

that he saw only the visible world. The mystical element is not
directly favourable to creative art. You see in Tolstoy how it

arrests and perplexes - how it lays a disturbing check on real
presentation - hindering the action, and is not favourable to the

loving and faithful representation, which, as Goethe said, all true
and high art should be. To some extent you see exactly the same

thing in Nathaniel Hawthorne as in Tolstoy. Hawthorne's
preoccupations in this way militated against his character-power;

his healthycharacters who would never have been influenced as he
describes by morbid ones yet are not only influenced according to

him, but suffer sadly. Phoebe Pyncheon in THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN
GABLES, gives sunshine to poor Hepzibah Clifford, but is herself

never merry again, though joyousness was her natural element. So,
doubtless, it would have been with Pansie in DOCTOR DOLLIVER, as

indeed it was with Zenobia and with the hero in the MARBLE FAUN.