this audacious paralogism."

Many writers have done the same - and not a few critics have hinted
at this: I do not think any writer has got at the radical truth of

it more directly, decisively, and clearly than "J. F. M.," in a
monthly magazine, about the time of Stevenson's death; and the

whole is so good and clear that I must quote it - the writer was
not thinking of the drama specially; only of prose fiction, and

this but makes the passage the more effective and apt to my point.
"In the outburst of regret which followed the death of Robert Louis

Stevenson, one leading journal dwelt on his too early removal in
middle life 'with only half his message delivered.' Such a phrase

may have been used in the mere cant of modern journalism. Still it
set one questioning what was Stevenson's message, or at least that

part of it which we had time given us to hear.
"Wonderful as was the popularity of the dead author, we are

inclined to doubt whether the right appreciation of him was half as
wide. To a certain section of the public he seemed a successful

writer of boys' books, which yet held captive older people. Now,
undoubtedly there was an element (not the highest) in his work

which fascinated boys. It gratified their yearning for adventure.
To too large a number of his readers, we suspect, this remains

Stevenson's chief charm; though even of those there were many able
to recognise and be thankful for the literary power and grace which

could serve up their sanguinary diet so daintily.
"Most of Stevenson's titles, too, like TREASURE ISLAND, KIDNAPPED,

and THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE, tended to fosterdelusion in this
direction. The books were largely bought for gifts by maiden

aunts, and bestowed as school prizes, when it might not have been
so had their titles given more indication of their real scope and

tendency.
"All this, it seems to us, has somewhat obscured Stevenson's true

power, which is surely that of an arch-delineator of 'human nature'
and of the devious ways of men. As we read him we feel that we

have our finger on the pulse of the cruel politics of the world.
He has the Shakespearean gift which makes us recognise that his

pirates and his statesmen, with their violence and their murders
and their perversions of justice, are swayed by the same interests

and are pulling the same strings and playing on the same passions
which are at work in quieter methods around ourselves. The vast

crimes and the recklessbloodshed are nothing more nor less than
stage effects used to accentuate for the common eye what the seer

can detect without them.
"And reading him from this standpoint, Stevenson's 'message' (so

far as it was delivered) appears to be that of utter gloom - the
creed that good is always overcome by evil. We do not mean in the

sense that good always suffers through evil and is frequently
crucified by evil. That is only the sowing of the martyr's blood,

which is, we know, the seed of the Church. We should not have
marvelled in the least that a genius like Stevenson should rebel

against mere external 'happy endings,' which, being in flat
contradiction to the ordinary ways of Providence, are little short

of thoughtlessblasphemy against Providence. But the terrible
thing about the Stevenson philosophy of life is that it seems to

make evil overcome good in the sense of absorbing it, or perverting
it, or at best lowering it. When good and evil come in conflict in

one person, Dr Jekyll vanishes into Mr Hyde. The awful Master of
Ballantrae drags down his brother, though he seems to fight for his

soul at every step. The sequel to KIDNAPPED shows David Balfour
ready at last to be hail-fellow-well-met with the supple

Prestongrange and the other intriguers, even though they had
forcibly made him a partner to their shedding of innocent blood.

"Is it possible that this was what Stevenson's experience of real
life had brought him? Fortunate himself in so many respects, he

was yet one of those who turn aside from the smooth and sunny paths
of life, to enter into brotherlysympathy and fellowship with the

disinherited. Is this, then, what he found on those darker levels?
Did he discover that triumphant" target="_blank" title="a.胜利的；洋洋得意的">triumphanthypocrisy treads down souls as well

as lives?
"We cannot doubt that it often does so; and it is well that we

should see this sometimes, to make us strong to contend with evil
before it works out this, its worst mischief, and to rouse us from

the easy optimist laziness which sits idle while others are being
wronged, and bids them believe 'that all will come right in the

end,' when it is our direct duty to do our utmost to make it 'come
right' to-day.

"But to show us nothing but the gloomy side, nothing but the
weakness of good, nothing but the strength of evil, does not

inspire us to contend for the right, does not inform us of the
powers and weapons with which we might so contend. To gaze at

unqualified and inevitable moral defeat will but leave us to the
still worse laziness of pessimism, uttering its discouraging and

blasphemous cry, 'It does not matter; nothing will ever come
right!'

"Shakespeare has shown us - and never so nobly as in his last great
creation of THE TEMPEST - that a man has one stronghold which none

but himself can deliver over to the enemy - that citadel of his own
conduct and character, from which he can smile supreme upon the

foe, who may have conquered all down the line, but must finally
make pause there.

"We must remember that THE TEMPEST was Shakespeare's last work.
The genuineconsciousness of the possible triumph of the moral

nature against every assault is probably reserved for the later
years of life, when, somewhat withdrawn from the passions of its

struggle, we become those lookers-on who see most of the game.
Strange fate is it that so much of our genius vanishes into the

great silence before those later years are reached!"
Stevenson was too late in awakening fully to the tragic error to

which short-sighted youth is apt to wander that "bad-heartedness is
strength." And so, from this point of view, to our sorrow, he too

much verified Goethe's saw that "simplicity (not artifice) and
repose are the acme of art, and therefore no youth can be a

master." In fact, he might very well from another side, have taken
one of Goethe's fine sayings as a motto for himself:

"Greatest saints were ever most kindly-hearted to sinners;
Here I'm a saint with the best; sinners I never could hate." (7)

Stevenson's own verdict on DEACON BRODIE given to a NEW YORK HERALD
reporter on the author's arrival in New York in September 1887, on

the LUDGATE HILL, is thus very near the precise truth: "The piece
has been all overhauled, and though I have no idea whether it will

please an audience, I don't think either Mr Henley or I are ashamed
of it. BUT WE WERE BOTH YOUNG MEN WHEN WE DID THAT, AND I THINK WE

HAD AN IDEA THAT BAD-HEARTEDNESS WAS STRENGTH."
If Mr Henley in any way confirmed R. L. Stevenson in this

perversion, as I much fear he did, no true admirer of Stevenson has
much to thank him for, whatever claims he may have fancied he had

to Stevenson's eternalgratitude. He did Stevenson about the very
worst turn he could have done, and aided and abetted in robbing us

and the world of yet greater works than we have had from his hands.
He was but condemning himself when he wrote some of the detractory

things he did in the PALL MALL MAGAZINE about the EDINBURGH
EDITION, etc. Men are mirrors in which they see each other:

Henley, after all, painted himself much more effectively in that
now notorious PALL MALL MAGAZINE article than he did R. L.

Stevenson. Such is the penalty men too often pay for wreaking
paltry revenges - writing under morbid memories and narrow and

petty grievances - they not only fail in truth and impartiality,
but inscribe a kind of grotesque parody of themselves in their

effort to make their subject ridiculous, as he did, for example,
about the name Lewis=Louis, and various other things.

R. L. Stevenson's fate was to be a casuistic and mystic moralist at
bottom, and could not help it; while, owing to some kink or twist,

due, perhaps, mainly to his earlier sufferings, and the teachings
he then received, he could not help giving it always a turn to what

he himself called "tail-foremost" or inverted morality; and it was
not till near the close that he fully awakened to the fact that

here he was false to the truest canons at once of morality and life
and art, and that if he pursued this course his doom was, and would