unshifting background, which by art may be relieved, but never
refined away wholly. He cannot escape from it if he would. Here,

too, as George MacDonald has neatly and nicely said: We are the
victims of our own past, and often a hand is put forth upon us from

behind and draws us into life backward. Here was Stevenson, with
his half-hedonistic theories of life, the duty of giving pleasure,

of making eyes brighter, and casting sunshine around one wherever
one went, yet the creator of gloom for us, when all the world was

before him where to choose. This fateful shadow pursued him to the
end, often giving us, as it were, the very justificative ground for

his own father's despondency and gloom, which the son rather too
decisively reproved, while he might have sympathised with it in a

stranger, and in that most characteristic" target="_blank" title="a.特有的 n.特性">characteristic letter to his mother,
which we have quoted, said that it made his father often seem, to

him, to be ungrateful - "HAS THE MAN NO GRATITUDE?" Two selves
thus persistently and constantly struggled in Stevenson. He was

from this point of view, indeed, his own Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the
buoyant, self-enjoying, because pleasure-conferring, man, and at

the same time the helpless yet fascinating "dark interpreter" of
the gloomy and gloom-inspiring side of life, viewed from the point

of view of dominating character and inherited influence. When he
reached out his hand with desire of pleasure-conferring, lo and

behold, as he wrote, a hand from his forefathers was stretched out,
and he was pulled backward; so that, as he has confessed, his

endings were apt to shame, perhaps to degrade, the beginnings.
Here is something pointing to the hidden and secret springs that

feed the deeper will and bend it to their service. Individuality
itself is but a mirror, which by its inequalities transforms things

to odd shapes. Hawthorne confessed to something of this sort. He,
like Stevenson, suffered much in youth, if not from disease then

through accident, which kept him long from youthful company. At a
time when he should have been running free with other boys, he had

to be lonely, reading what books he could lay his hands on, mostly
mournful and puritanic, by the borders of lone Sebago Lake. He

that hath once in youth been touched by this Marah-rod of
bitterness will not easily escape from it, when he essays in later

years to paint life and the world as he sees them; nay, the hand,
when he deems himself freest, will be laid upon him from behind, if

not to pull him, as MacDonald has said, into life backward, then to
make him a mournfulwitness of having once been touched by the

Marah-rod, whose bitterness again declares itself and wells out its
bitterness when set even in the rising and the stirring of the

waters.
Such is our view of the "gloom" of Stevenson - a gloom which well

might have justified something of his father's despondency. He
struggles in vain to escape from it - it narrows, it fatefully

hampers and limits the free field of his art, lays upon it a
strange atmosphere, fascinating, but not favourable to true

dramaticbreadth and force, and spontaneous natural simplicity,
invariably lending a certain touch of weakness, inconsistency, and

inconclusiveness to his endings; so that he himself could too often
speak of them afterwards as apt to "shame, perhaps to degrade, the

beginnings." This is what true dramatic art should never do. In
the ending all that may raise legitimate question in the process -

all that is confusing, perplexing in the separate parts - is met,
solved, reconciled, at least in a way satisfactory to the general,

or ordinary mind; and thus such unity is by it so gained and
sealed, that in no case can the true artist, whatever faults may

lie in portions of the process-work, say of his endings that "they
shame, perhaps degrade, the beginning." Wherever this is the case

there will be "gloom," and there will also be a sad, tormenting
sense of something wanting. "The evening brings a 'hame';" so

should it be here - should it especially be in a dramatic work. If
not, "We start; for soul is wanting there;" or, if not soul, then

the last halo of the soul's serenetriumph. From this side, too,
there is another cause for the undramaticcharacter, in the

stricter sense of Stevenson's work generally: it is, after all,
distressful, unsatisfying, egotistic, for fancy is led at the beck

of some pre-established disharmony which throws back an abiding and
irremovable gloom on all that went before; and the free spontaneous

grace of natural creation which ensures natural simplicity is, as
said already, not quite attained.

It was well pointed out in HAMMERTON, by an unanonymous author
there quoted (pp. 22, 23), that while in the story, Hyde, the worse

one, wins, in Stevenson himself - in his real life - Jekyll won,
and not Mr Hyde. This writer, too, might have added that the

Master of Ballantrae also wins as well as Beau Austin and Deacon
Brodie. R. L. Stevenson's dramatic art and a good deal of his

fiction, then, was untrue to his life, and on one side was a lie -
it was not in consonance with his own practice or his belief as

expressed in life.
In some other matters the test laid down here is not difficult of

application. Stevenson, at the time he wrote THE FOREIGNER AT
HOME, had seen a good deal; he had been abroad; he had already had

experiences; he had had differences with his father about Calvinism
and some other things; and yet just see how he applies the standard

of his earlier knowledge and observation to England - and by doing
so, cannot help exaggerating the outstanding differences, always

with an almost provincialaccent of unwavering conviction due to
his early associations and knowledge. He cannot help paying an

excessive tribute to the Calvinism he had formally rejected, in so
far as, according to him, it goes to form character - even national

character, at all events, in its production of types; and he never
in any really effective way glances at what Mr Matthew Arnold

called "Scottish manners, Scottish drink" as elements in any way
radically qualifying. It is not, of course, that I, as a Scotsman,

well acquainted with rural life in some parts of England, as with
rural life in many parts of Scotland in my youth, do not heartily

agree with him - the point is that, when he comes to this sort of
comparison and contrast, he writes exactly as his father would or

might have done, with a full consciousness, after all, of the
tribute he was paying to the practical outcome on character of the

Calvinism in which he so thoroughly believed. It is, in its way, a
very peculiar thing - and had I space, and did I believe it would

prove interesting to readers in general, I might write an essay on
it, with instances - in which case the Address to the Scottish

Clergy would come in for more notice, citation and application than
it has yet received. But meanwhile just take this little snippet -

very characteristic" target="_blank" title="a.特有的 n.特性">characteristic and very suggestive in its own way - and tell
me whether it does not justify and bear out fully what I have now

said as illustrating a certain side and a strange uncertain
limitation in Stevenson:

"But it is not alone in scenery and architecture that we count
England foreign. The constitution of society, the very pillars of

the empire, surprise and even pain us. The dull neglected peasant,
sunk in matter, insolent, gross and servile, makes a startling

contrast to our own long-legged, long-headed, thoughtful, Bible-
loving ploughman. A week or two in such a place as Suffolk leaves

the Scotsman gasping. It seems impossible that within the
boundaries of his own island a class should have been thus

forgotten. Even the educated and intelligent who hold our own
opinions and speak in our own words, yet seem to hold them with a

difference or from another reason, and to speak on all things with
less interest and conviction. The first shock of English society

is like a cold plunge." (8)
As there was a great deal of the "John Bull element" (9) in the

little dreamer De Quincey, so there was a great deal, after all, of
the rather conceited Calvinistic Scot in R. L. Stevenson, and it is

to be traced as clearly in certain of his fictions as anywhere,
though he himself would not perhaps have seen it and acknowledged

it, as I am here forced now to see it, and to acknowledge it for
him.

CHAPTER XVII - PROOFS OF GROWTH
Once again I quote Goethe:

"Natural simplicity and repose are the acme of art, and hence it
follows no youth can be a master." It has to be confessed that