misgivings Louis hardened his heart, put on his cap, walked out - a

refined little figure - approached the object of his sympathy, and
said, 'Will you let me play with you?' 'Go to hell!' said the

democratic offspring of the baker. This lesson against doing good
by stealth to persons of unknown or hostiledisposition was, it

seems, thrown away. Such endeavours are apt to be misconstrued."
CHAPTER XXVIII - UNEXPECTED COMBINATIONS

THE complete artist should not be mystical-moralist any more than
the man who "perceives only the visible world" - he should not

engage himself with problems in the direct sense any more than he
should blind himself to their effect upon others, whom he should

study, and under certain conditions represent, though he should not
commit himself to any form of zealot faith, yet should he not be,

as Lord Tennyson puts it in the Palace of Art:
"As God holding no form of creed,

But contemplating all,"
because his power lies in the broadness of his humanity touched to

fine issues whenever there is the seal at once of truth, reality,
and passion, and the tragedy bred of their contact and conflict.

All these things are to him real and clamant in the measure that
they aid appeal to heart and emotion - in the measure that they

may, in his hands, be made to tell for sympathy and general effect.
He creates an atmosphere in which each and all may be seen the more

effectively, but never seen alone or separate, but only in strict
relation to each other that they may heighten the sense of some

supreme controlling power in the destinies of men, which with the
ancients was figured as Fate, and for which the moderns have hardly

yet found an enduring and exhaustive name. Character revealed in
reference to that, is the ideal and the aim of all high creative

art. Stevenson's narrowness, allied to a quaint and occasionally
just a wee pedantic finickiness, as we may call it - an over-

elaborate, almost tricky play with mere words and phrases, was in
so far alien to the very highest - he was too often like a man

magnetised and moving at the dictates of some outside influence
rather than according to his own freewill and as he would.

Action in creativeliterary art is a SINE QUA NON; keeping all the
characters and parts in unison, that a true DENOUEMENT, determined

by their own tendencies and temperaments, may appear; dialogue and
all asides, if we may call them so, being supererogatory and weak

really unless they aid this and are constantly contributory to it.
Egotistical predeterminations, however artfully intruded, are,

alien to the full result, the unity which is finally craved:
Stevenson fails, when he does fail, distinctly from excess of

egotistic regards; he is, as Henley has said, in the French sense,
too PERSONNEL, and cannot escape from it. And though these

personal regards are exceedingly interesting and indeed fascinating
from the point of view of autobiographical study, they are, and

cannot but be, a drawback on fiction or the disinterested
revelation of life and reality. Instead, therefore, of "the

visible world," as the only thing seen, Stevenson's defect is, that
between it and him lies a cloud strictly self-projected, like

breath on a mirror, which dims the lines of reality and confuses
the character marks, in fact melting them into each other; and in

his sympathetic regards, causing them all to become too much alike.
Scott had more of the power of healthy self-withdrawal, creating

more of a free atmosphere, in which his characters could freely
move - though in this, it must be confessed, he failed far more

with women than with men. The very defects poor Carlyle found in
Scott, and for which he dealt so severely with him, as sounding no

depth, are really the basis of his strength, precisely as the
absence of them were the defects of Goethe, who invariably ran his

characters finally into the mere moods of his own mind and the
mould of his errant philosophy, so that they became merely erratic

symbols without hold in the common sympathy. Whether
WALVERWANDSCHAFTEN, WILHELM MEISTER, or FAUST, it is still the same

- the company before all is done are translated into misty shapes
that he actually needs to label for our identification and for his

own. Even Mr G. H. Lewes saw this and could not help declaring his
own lack of interest in the latter parts of Goethe's greatest

efforts. Stevenson, too, tends to run his characters into symbols
- his moralist-fabulist determinations are too much for him - he

would translate them into a kind of chessmen, moved or moving on a
board. The essence of romancestrictly is, that as the characters

will not submit themselves to the check of reality, the romancer
may consciously, if it suits him, touch them at any point with the

magic wand of symbol, and if he finds a consistency in mere
fanciful invention it is enough. Tieck's PHANTASUS and George

MacDonald's PHANTASTES are ready instances illustrative of this.
But it is very different with the story of real life, where there

is a definite check in the common-sense and knowledge of the
reader, and where the highest victory always lies in drawing from

the reader the admission - "that is life - life exactly as I have
seen and known it. Though I could never have put it so, still it

only realises my own conception and observation. That is something
lovingly remembered and re-presented, and this master makes me

lovingly remember too, though 'twas his to represent and reproduce
with such vigor, vividness and truth that he carried me with him,

exactly as though I had been looking on real men and women playing
their part or their game in the great world."

Mr Zangwill, in his own style, wrote:
"He seeks to combine the novel of character with the novel of

adventure; to develop character through romantic action, and to
bring out your hero at the end of the episode, not the fixed

character he was at the beginning, as is the way of adventure
books, but a modified creature. . . . It is his essays and his

personality, rather than his novels, that will count with
posterity. On the whole, a great provincialwriter. Whether he

has that inherent grip which makes a man's provinciality the very
source of his strength . . . only the centuries can show.

The romanticist to the end pursued Stevenson - he could not, wholly
or at once, shake off the bonds in which he had bound himself to

his first love, and it was the romanticist crossed by the casuist,
and the mystic - Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Markheim and Will of the

Mill, insisted on his acknowledging them in his work up to the end.
THE MODIFIED CREATURE at the end of Mr Zangwill was modified too

directly by the egotistic element as well as through the romantic
action, and this point missed the great defect was missed, and Mr

Zangwill spoke only in generals.
M. Schwob, after having related how unreal a real sheep's heart

looked when introduced on the end of Giovanni's dagger in a French
performance of John Ford's ANNABELLA AND GIOVANNI, and how at the

next performance the audience was duly thrilled when Annabella's
bleeding heart, made of a bit of red flannel, was borne upon the

stage, goes on to say significantly:
"Il me semble que les personnages de Stevenson ont justement cette

espece de realisme irreal. La large figure luisante de Long John,
la couleur bleme du crane de Thevenin Pensete s'attachent a la

memoire de nos yeux en vertue de leur irrealite meme. Ce sont des
fantomes de la verite, hallucinants comme de vrais fantomes. Notez

en passant que les traits de John Silver hallucinent Jim Hawkins,
et que Francois Villon est hante par l'aspect de Thevenin Pensete."

Perhaps the most notable fact arising here, and one that well
deserves celebration, is this, that Stevenson's development towards

a broader and more natural creation was coincident with a definite
return on the religious views which had so powerfully prevailed

with his father - a circumstance which it is to be feared did not,
any more than some other changes in him, at all commend itself to

Mr Henley, though he had deliberately dubbed him even in the times
of nursing nigh to the Old Bristo Port in Edinburgh - something of

"Shorter Catechist." Anyway Miss Simpson deliberately wrote:
"Mr Henley takes exception to Stevenson's later phase in life -

what he calls his 'Shorter Catechism phase.' It should be
remembered that Mr Henley is not a Scotsman, and in some things has

little sympathy with Scotch characteristics. Stevenson, in his
Samoan days, harked back to the teaching of his youth; the tenets

of the Shorter Catechism, which his mother and nurse had dinned