The transformation of villain into hero, if possible at all, could

only be convincingly effected in a piece of wide scope, where there
was room for working out the effect of some great shock, upheaval

of the nature, change due to deep and unprecedented experiences -
religious conversion, witnessing of sudden death, providential

rescue from great peril of death, or circumstance of that kind; but
to be effective and convincing it needs to be marked and FULLY

JUSTIFIED in some such way; and no cleverness in the writer will
absolve him from deference to this great law in serious work for

presentation on the stage; if mere farces or little comedies may
seem sometimes to contravene it, yet this - even this - is only in

appearance.
True, it is not the dramatists part OF HIMSELF to condemn, or to

approve, or praise: he has to present, and to present various
characters faithfully in their relation to each other, and their

effect upon each other. But the moral element cannot be expunged
or set lightly aside because it is closely involved in the very

working out and presentation of these relations, and the effect
upon each other. Character is vital. And character, if it tells

in life, in influence and affection, must be made to tell directly
also in the drama. There is no escape from this - none; the

dramatist is lopsided if he tries to ignore it; he is a monster if
he is wholly blind to it - like the poet in IN MEMORIAM, "Without a

conscience or an aim." Mr Henley, in his notorious, all too
confessional, and yet rather affected article on Stevenson in the

PALL MALL MAGAZINE, has a remark which I confess astonished me - a
remark I could never forget as coming from him. He said that he

"had lived a very full and varied life, and had no interest in
remarks about morals." "Remarks about morals" are, nevertheless,

in essence, the pith of all the books to which he referred, as
those to which he turned in preference to the EDINBURGH EDITION of

R. L. Stevenson's works. The moral element is implicit in the
drama, and it is implicit there because it is implicit in life

itself, or so the great common-sense conceives it and demands it.
What we might call the asides proper of the drama, are "remarks

about morals," nothing else - the chorus in the Greek tragedy
gathered up "remarks about morals" as near as might be to the

"remarks about morals" in the streets of that day, only shaped to a
certain artisticconsistency. Shakespeare is rich in "remarks

about morals," often coming near, indeed, to personal utterance,
and this not only when Polonius addresses his son before his going

forth on his travels. Mr Henley here only too plainlyconfessed,
indeed, to lack of that conviction and insight which, had he but

possessed them, might have done a little to relieve BEAU AUSTIN and
the other plays in which he collaborated with R. L. Stevenson, from

their besetting and fatal weakness. The two youths, alas! thought
they could be grandly original by despising, or worse, contemning

"remarks about morals" in the loftier as in the lower sense. To
"live a full and varied life," if the experience derived from it is

to have expression in the drama, is only to have the richer
resource in "remarks about morals." If this is perverted under any

self-conscious notion of doing something spick-and-span new in the
way of character and plot, alien to all the old conceptions, then

we know our writers set themselves boldly at loggerheads with
certain old-fashioned and yet older new-fashioned laws, which

forbid the violation of certain common demands of the ordinary
nature and common-sense; and for the lack of this, as said already,

no cleverness, no resource, no style or graft, will any way make
up. So long as this is tried, with whateverconcentration of mind

and purpose, failure is yet inevitable, and the more inevitable the
more concentration and less of humorous by-play, because genius

itself, if it despises the general moral sentiment and instinct for
moral proportion - an ethnic reward and punishment, so to say - is

all astray, working outside the line; and this, if Mr Pinero will
kindly excuse me, is the secret of the failure of these plays, and

not want of concentration, etc., in the sense he meant, or as he
has put it.

Stevenson rather affected what he called "tail-foremost morality,"
a kind of inversion in the field of morals, as De Quincey mixed it

up with tail-foremost humour in MURDER AS A FINE ART, etc., etc.,
but for all such perversions as these the stage is a grand test and

corrector, and such perversions, and not "remarks about morals,"
are most strictly prohibited there. Perverted subtleties of the

sort Stevenson in earlier times especially much affected are not
only amiss but ruinous on the stage; and what genius itself would

maybe sanction, common-sense must reject and rigidly cut away.
Final success and triumph come largely by THIS kind of condensation

and concentration, and the stern and severe lopping off of the
indulgence of the EGOTISTICAL genius, which is human discipline,

and the best exponent of the doctrine of unity also. This is the
straight and the narrow way along which genius, if it walk but

faithfully, sows as it goes in the dramaticpathway all the flowers
of human passion, hope, love, terror, and triumph.

I find it advisable, if not needful, here to reinforce my own
impressions, at some points, by another quotation from Mr Baildon,

if he will allow me, in which Stevenson's dependence in certain
respects on the dream-faculty is emphasised, and to it is traced a

certain tendency to a moral callousness or indifference which is
one of the things in which the waking Stevenson transparently

suffered now and then invasions from the dream-Stevenson - the
result, a kind of spot, as we may call it, on the eye of the moral

sense; it is a small spot; but we know how a very small object held
close before the eye will wholly shut out the most lovely natural

prospects, interposing distressful phantasmagoria, due to the
strained and, for the time, morbid condition of the organ itself.

So, it must be confessed, it is to a great extent here.
But listen to Mr Baildon:

"In A CHAPTER ON DREAMS, Stevenson confesses his indebtedness to
this still mysteriousagency. From a child he had been a great and

vivid dreamer, his dreams often taking such frightful shape that he
used to awake 'clinging in terror to the bedpost.' Later in life

his dreams continued to be frequent and vivid, but less terrifying
in character and more continuous and systematic. 'The Brownies,'

as he picturesquely names that 'sub-conscious imagination,' as the
scientist would call it, that works with such surprising freedom

and ingenuity in our dreams, became, as it were, COLLABORATEURS in
his work of authorship. He declares that they invented plots and

even elaborated whole novels, and that, not in a single night or
single dream, but continuously, and from one night to another, like

a story in serial parts. Long before this essay was written or
published, I had been struck by this phantasmal dream-like quality

in some of Stevenson's works, which I was puzzled to account for,
until I read this extraordinaryexplanation, for explanation it

undoubtedly affords. Anything imagined in a dream would have a
tendency, when retold, to retain something of its dream-like

character, and I have on doubt one could trace in many instances
and distinguish the dreaming and the waking Stevenson, though in

others they may be blended beyond recognition. The trouble with
the Brownies or the dream-Stevenson WAS HIS OR THEIR WANT OF MORAL

SENSE, so that they sometimes presented the waking author with
plots which he could not make use of. Of this Stevenson gives an

instance in which a complete story of marked ingenuity is vetoed
through the moral impossibility of its presentment by a writer so

scrupulous (and in some directions he is extremely scrupulous) as
Stevenson was. But Stevenson admits that his most famous story,

THE STRANGE CASE OF DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE, was not only suggested
by a dream, but that some of the most important and most criticised

points, such as the matter of the powder, were taken direct from
the dream. It had been extremelyinstructive and interesting had

he gone more into detail and mentioned some of the other stories
into which the dream-element entered largely and pointed out its

influence, and would have given us a better clue than we have or
now ever can have.

"Even in THE SUICIDE CLUB and the RAJAH'S DIAMOND, I seem to feel
strongly the presence of the dream-Stevenson. . . . AT CERTAIN

POINTS ONE FEELS CONSCIOUS OF A CERTAIN MORAL CALLOUSNESS, SUCH AS
MARKS THE DREAM STATE, AS IN THE MURDER OF COLONEL GERALDINE'S

BROTHER, THE HORROR OF WHICH NEVER SEEMS TO COME FULLY HOME TO US.
But let no one suppose these stories are lacking in vividness and

in strangelyrealistic detail; for this is of the very nature of
dreaming at its height. . . . While the DRAMATIS PERSONAE play

their parts with the utmost spirit while the story proceeds, they
do not, as the past creations do, seem to survive this first

contact and live in our minds. This is particularly true of the
women. They are well drawn, and play the assigned parts well