has escaped. Much may be made of this idea.'
'The scene of a story or sketch to be laid within the light of a

street lantern; the time when the lamp is near going out; and the
catastrophe to be simultaneous with the last flickering gleam.'

'A person to be writing a tale and to find it shapes itself against
his intentions; that the characters act otherwise than he thought,

and a catastrophe comes which he strives in vain to avert. It
might shadow forth his own fate - he having made himself one of the

personages.'
'Two persons to be expecting some occurrence and watching for the

two principal actors in it, and to find that the occurrence is even
then passing, and that they themselves are the two actors.'

'A satire on ambition and fame from a statue of snow.'
Hawthorne used this idea in one of his sketches.

'A moral philosopher to buy a slave, or otherwise get possession of
a human being, and to use him for the sake of experiment by trying

the operation of a certain vice on him.'
M. Bourget, the French romancer, has made use of this idea in his

novel called LE DISCIPLE. Only it is not a slave, but a young girl
whom he pretends to love, that is the subject of the moral

philosopher's experiment; and a noisy war has been waged round the
book in France. Hawthorne would plainly have seized the romantic

essence of the idea and would have avoided the boneyard of 'problem
morality.'

'A story the principalpersonage of which shall seem always on the
point of entering on the scene, but shall never appear.'

This is the device that gives fascination to the figures of
Richelieu in MARION DELORME, and of Captain Flint in TREASURE

ISLAND.
'The majesty of death to be exemplified in a beggar, who, after

being seen humble and cringing in the streets of a city for many
years, at length by some means or other gets admittance into a rich

man's mansion, and there dies - assuming state, and striking awe
into the breasts of those who had looked down upon him.'

These are all excellent instances of the sort of idea that gives
life to a romance - of acts or attitudes that stamp themselves upon

the mind's eye. Some of them appealchiefly to the mind's eye,
others are of value chiefly as symbols. But, for the most part,

the romantickernel of a story is neither pure picture nor pure
allegory, it can neither be painted nor moralised. It makes its

most irresistibleappeal neither to the eye that searches for form
and colour, nor to the reason that seeks for abstract truth, but to

the blood, to all that dim instinct of danger, mystery, and
sympathy in things that is man's oldest inheritance - to the

superstitions of the heart. Romance vindicates the supernatural
against science and rescues it from the palsied tutelage of

morality.
Stevenson's work is a gallery of romantic effects that haunt the

memory. Some of these are directly pictorial: the fight in the
round-house on board the brig COVENANT; the duel between the two

brothers of Ballantrae in the island of light thrown up by the
candles from that abyss of windless night; the flight of the

Princess Seraphina through the dark mazes of the wood, - all these,
although they carry with them subtleties beyond the painter's art,

yet have something of picture in them. But others make entrance to
the corridors of the mind by blind and secret ways, and there

awaken the echoes of primaeval fear. The cry of the parrot -
'Pieces of eight' - the tapping of the stick of the blind pirate

Pew as he draws near the inn-parlour, and the similar effects of
inexplicable terrorwrought by the introduction of the blind

catechist in KIDNAPPED, and of the disguise of a blind leper in THE
BLACK ARROW, are beyond the reach of any but the literary form of

romantic art. The last appearance of Pew, in the play of ADMIRAL
GUINEA, written in collaboration with Mr. W. E. Henley, is perhaps

the masterpiece of all the scenes of terror. The blind ruffian's
scream of panic fear, when he puts his groping hand into the

burning flame of the candle in the room where he believed that he
was unseen, and so realises that his every movement is being

silently watched, is indeed 'the horrors come alive.'
The animating principle or idea of Stevenson's longer stories is

never to be found in their plot, which is generally built
carelessly and disjointedly enough around the central romantic

situation or conception. The main situation in THE WRECKER is a
splendid product of romanticaspiration, but the structure of the

story is incoherent and ineffective, so that some of the best
passages in the book - the scenes in Paris, for instance - have no

business there at all. The story in KIDNAPPED and CATRIONA wanders
on in a single thread, like the pageant of a dream, and the reader

feels and sympathises with the author's obvious difficulty in
leading it back to the scene of the trial and execution of James

Stewart. THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE is stamped with a magnificent
unity of conception, but the story illuminates that conception by a

series of scattered episodes.
That lurid embodiment of fascinating evil, part vampire, part

Mephistopheles, whose grand manner and heroic abilities might have
made him a great and good man but for 'the malady of not wanting,'

is the light and meaning of the whole book. Innocent and
benevolent lives are thrown in his way that he may mock or distort

or shatter them. Stevenson never came nearer than in this
character to the sublime of power.

But an informing principle of unity is more readily to be
apprehended in the shorter stories, and it is a unity not so much

of plot as of impression and atmosphere. His islands, whether
situated in the Pacific or off the coast of Scotland, have each of

them a climate of its own, and the character of the place seems to
impose itself on the incidents that occur, dictating subordination

or contrast. The events that happen within the limits of one of
these magic isles could in every case be cut off from the rest of

the story and framed as a separate work of art. The long
starvation of David Balfour on the island of Earraid, the sharks of

crime and monsters of blasphemy that break the peace of the shining
tropical lagoons in TREASURE ISLAND and THE EBB TIDE, the captivity

on the Bass Rock in CATRIONA, the supernatural terrors that hover
and mutter over the island of THE MERRY MEN - these imaginations

are plainly generated by the scenery against which they are thrown;
each is in some sort the genius of the place it inhabits.

In his search for the treasures of romance, Stevenson adventured
freely enough into the realm of the supernatural.

When he is handling the superstitions of the Scottish people, he
allows his humorousenjoyment of their extravagance to peep out

from behind the solemndialect in which they are dressed. The
brief tale of THRAWN JANET, and Black Andy's story of Tod Lapraik

in CATRIONA, are grotesqueimaginations of the school of TAM O'
SHANTER rather than of the school of Shakespeare, who deals in no

comedy ghosts. They are turnip-lanterns swayed by a laughing
urchin, proud of the fears he can awaken. Even THE STRANGE CASE OF

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE and the story of THE BOTTLE IMP are
manufactured bogeys, that work on the nerves and not on the heart,

whatever may be said by those who insist on seeing allegory in what
is only dream-fantasy. The supernatural must be rooted deeper than

these in life and experience if it is to reach an imposing stature:
the true ghost is the shadow of a man. And Stevenson shows a sense

of this in two of his very finest stories, the exquisite idyll of
WILL O' THE MILL and the grim history of MARKHEIM. Each of these

stories is the work of a poet, by no means of a goblin-fancier.
The personification of Death is as old as poetry; it is wrought

with moving gentleness in that last scene in the arbour of Will's
inn. The wafted scent of the heliotropes, which had never been

planted in the garden since Marjory's death, the light in the room
that had been hers, prelude the arrival at the gate of the

stranger's carriage, with the black pine tops standing above it
like plumes. And Will o' the Mill makes the acquaintance of his

physician and friend, and goes at last upon his travels. In the
other story, Markheim meets with his own double in the house of the

dealer in curiosities, whom he has murdered. It is not such a
double as Rossetti prayed for to the god of Sleep:

'Ah! might I, by thy good grace,
Groping in the windy stair

(Darkness and the breath of space