believe, in which there is too definite a machinery set agoing for
horrors for the horrors to be quite genuine. The process is often

too forced with Stevenson, and the incidents too much of the
manufactured order, for the triumph of that simplicity which is of

inspiration and unassailable. Here Stevenson, alas! all too often,
PACE Mr Marriott Watson, treads on the skirts of E. A. Poe, and

that in his least composed and elevated artistic moments. And
though, it is true, that "genius will not follow rules laid down by

desultory critics," yet when it is averred that "this piece of work
fulfils Aristotle's definition of true tragedy, in accomplishing

upon the reader a certain purification of the emotions by means of
terror and pity," expectations will be raised in many of the new

generation, doomed in the cases of the more sensitive and
discerning, at all events, not to be gratified. There is a

distinction, very bold and very essential, between melodrama,
however carefully worked and staged, and that tragedy to which

Aristotle was there referring. Stevenson's "horrifying," to my
mind, too often touches the trying borders of melodrama, and

nowhere more so than in the very forced and unequal EBB-TIDE,
which, with its rather doubtful moral and forced incident when it

is good, seems merely to borrow from what had gone before, if not a
very little even from some of what came after. No service is done

to an author like Stevenson by fatefully praising him for precisely
the wrong thing.

"Romance attracted Stevenson, at least during the earlier part of
his life, as a lodestone attracts the magnet. To romance he

brought the highest gifts, and he has left us not only essays of
delicate humour" (should this not be "essays FULL OF" OR

"characterised by"?) "and sensitiveimagination, but stories also
which thrill with the realities of life, which are faithful

pictures of the times and tempers he dealt with, and which, I
firmly believe, will live so" (should it not be "as"?) "long as our

noble English language."
Mr Marriott Watson sees very clearly in some things; but

occasionally he misses the point. The problem is here raised how
two honest, far-seeing critics could see so very differently on so

simple a subject.
Mr Baildon says about the EBB-TIDE:

"I can compare his next book, the EBB-TIDE (in collaboration with
Osbourne) to little better than a mud-bath, for we find ourselves,

as it were, unrelieved by dredging among the scum and dregs of
humanity, the 'white trash' of the Pacific. Here we have

Stevenson's masterly but utterly revolting incarnation of the
lowest, vilest, vulgarest villainy in the cockney, Huish.

Stevenson's other villains shock us by their cruel and wicked
conduct; but there is a kind of fallen satanic glory about them,

some shining threads of possible virtue. They might have been
good, even great in goodness, but for the malady of not wanting.

But Huish is a creature hatched in slime, his soul has no true
humanity: it is squat and toad-like, and can only spit venom. . .

. He himself felt a sort of revulsive after-sickness for the story,
and calls it in one passage of his VAILIMA LETTERS 'the ever-to-be-

execrated EBB-TIDE' (pp. 178 and 184). . . . He repented of it
like a debauch, and, as with some men after a debauch, felt cleared

and strengthened instead of wrecked. So, after what in one sense
was his lowest plunge, Stevenson rose to the greatest height. That

is the tribute to his virtue and strength indeed, but it does not
change the character of the EBB-TIDE as 'the ever-to-be-

execrated.'"
Mr Baildon truly says (p. 49):

"The curious point is that Stevenson's own great fault, that
tendency to what has been called the 'Twopence-coloured' style, is

always at its worst in books over which he collaborated."
"Verax," in one of his "Occasional Papers" in the DAILY NEWS on

"The Average Reader" has this passage:
"We should not object to a writer who could repeat Barrie in A

WINDOW IN THRUMS, nor to one who would paint a scene as Louis
Stevenson paints Attwater alone on his South Sea island, the

approach of the pirates to the harbour, and their subsequent
reception and fate. All these are surely specimens of brilliant

writing, and they are brilliant because, in the first place, they
give truth. The events described must, in the supposed

circumstances, and with the given characters, have happened in the
way stated. Only in none of the specimens have we a mere

photograph of the outside of what took place. We have great
pictures by genius of the - to the prosaic eye - invisible

realities, as well as of the outward form of the actions. We
behold and are made to feel the solemnity, the wildness, the

pathos, the earnestness, the agony, the pity, the moral squalor,
the grotesque fun, the delicate and minute beauty, the natural

loveliness and loneliness, the quiet desperatebravery, or whatever
else any of these wonderful pictures disclose to our view. Had we

been lookers-on, we, the average readers, could not have seen these
qualities for ourselves. But they are there, and genius enables us

to see them. Genius makes truth shine.
"Is it not, therefore, probable that the brilliancy which we

average readers do not want, and only laugh at when we get it, is
something altogether different? I think I know what it is. It is

an attempt to describe with words without thoughts, an effort to
make readers see something the writer has never seen himself in his

mind's eye. He has no revelation, no vision, nothing to disclose,
and to produce an impression uses words, words, words, makes daub,

daub, daub, without any definite purpose, and certainly without any
real, or artistic, or definite effect. To describe, one must first

of all see, and if we see anything the description of it will, as
far as it is in us, come as effortless and natural as the leaves on

trees, or as 'the tender greening of April meadows.' I, therefore,
more than suspect that the brilliancy which the average reader

laughs at is not brilliancy. A pot of flaming red paint thrown at
a canvas does not make a picture."

Now there is vision for outward picture or separate incident, which
may exist quite apart from what may be called moral, spiritual, or

even loftily imaginativeconception, at once commanding unity and
commanding it. There can be no doubt of Stevenson's power in the

former line - the earliest as the latest of his works are witnesses
to it. THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE abounds in picture and incident

and dramatic situations and touches; but it lacks true unity, and
the reason simply is given by Stevenson himself - that the "ending

shames, perhaps degrades, the beginning," as it is in the EBB-TIDE,
with the cockney Huish, "execrable." "We have great pictures by

genius of the - to the prosaic eye - invisible realities, as well
as the outward form of the action." True, but the "invisible

realities" form that from which true unity is derived, else their
partial presence but makes the whole the more incomplete and lop-

sided, if not indeed, top-heavy, from light weight beneath; and it
is in the unity derived from this higher pervading, yet not too

assertive "invisible reality," that Stevenson most often fails, and
is, in his own words, "execrable"; the ending shaming, if not

degrading, the beginning - "and without the true sense of
pleasurableness; and therefore really imperfect IN ESSENCE." Ah,

it is to be feared that Stevenson, viewing it in retrospect, was a
far truer critic of his own work, than many or most of his all too

effusive and admiring critics - from Lord Rosebery to Mr Marriott
Watson.

Amid the too extreme deliverances of detractors and especially of
erewhile friends, become detractors or panegyrists, who disturb

judgment by overzeal, which is often but half-blindness, it is
pleasant to come on one who bears the balances in his hand, and

will report faithfully as he has seen and felt, neither more nor
less than what he holds is true. Mr Andrew Lang wrote an article

in the MORNING POST of 16th December 1901, under the title
"Literary Quarrels," in which, as I think, he fulfilled his part in

midst of the talk about Mr Henley's regrettable attack on
Stevenson.

"Without defending the character of a friend whom even now I almost