' "Nay," said he, "let be. Y' have played the devil with me, and

let that content you."
'The words died in Richard's throat. He saw, through tears, the

poor old man, bemused with liquor and sorrow, go shambling away,
with bowed head, across the snow, and the unnoticed dog whimpering

at his heels; and for the first time began to understand the
desperate game that we play in life, and how a thing once done is

not to be changed or remedied by any penitence.'
A similar wisdom that goes to the heart of things is found on the

lips of the spiritual visitant in Markheim.
' "Murder is to me no special category," replied the other. "All

sins are murder, even as all life is war. I behold your race, like
starving mariners on a raft, plucking crusts out of the hands of

famine, and feeding on each other's lives. I follow sins beyond
the moment of their acting; I find in all that the last consequence

is death; and to my eyes the pretty maid, who thwarts her mother
with such taking graces on a question of a ball, drips no less

visibly with human gore than such a murderer as yourself." '
The wide outlook on humanity that expresses itself in passages like

these is combined in Stevenson with a vivid interest in, and quick
appreciation of, character. The variety of the characters that he

has essayed to draw is enormous, and his successes, for the
purposes of his stories, are many. Yet with all this, the number

of lifelike portraits, true to a hair, that are to be found in his
works is very small indeed. In the golden glow of romance,

character is always subject to be idealised; it is the effect of
character seen at particular angles and in special lights, natural

or artificial, that Stevenson paints; he does not attempt to
analyse the complexity of its elements, but boldly projects into it

certain principles, and works from those. It has often been said
of Scott that he could not draw a lady who was young and beautiful;

the glamour of chivalry blinded him, he lowered his eyes and
described his emotions and aspirations. Something of the same

disability afflicted Stevenson in the presence of a ruffian. He
loved heroic vice only less than he loved heroicvirtue, and was

always ready to idealise his villains, to make of them men who,
like the Master of Ballantrae, 'lived for an idea.' Even the low

and lesser villainy of Israel Hands, in the great scene where he
climbs the mast to murder the hero of TREASURE ISLAND, breathes out

its soul in a creed:
' "For thirty years," he said, "I've sailed the seas, and seen good

and bad, better and worse, provisions running out, knives going,
and what not. Well, now I tell you, I never seen good come o'

goodness yet. Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don't
bite; them's my views - Amen, so be it." '

John Silver, that memorablepirate, with a face like a ham and an
eye like a fragment of glass stuck into it, leads a career of

wholehearted crime that can only be described as sparkling. His
unalloyed maleficence is adorned with a thousand graces of manner.

Into the dark and fetid marsh that is an evil heart, where low
forms of sentiency are hardly distinguishable from the all-

pervading mud, Stevenson never peered, unless it were in the study
of Huish in THE EBB TIDE.

Of his women, let women speak. They are traditionally accredited
with an intuition of one another's hearts, although why, if woman

was created for man, as the Scriptures assure us, the impression
that she makes on him should not count for as much as the

impression she makes on some other woman, is a question that cries
for solution. Perhaps the answer is that disinterested curiosity,

which is one means of approach to the knowledge of character,
although only one, is a rare attitude for man to assume towards the

other sex. Stevenson's curiosity was late in awaking; the heroine
of THE BLACK ARROW is dressed in boy's clothes throughout the

course of the story, and the novelist thus saved the trouble of
describing the demeanour of a girl. Mrs. Henry, in THE MASTER OF

BALLANTRAE, is a charming veiled figure, drawn in the shadow; Miss
Barbara Grant and Catriona in the continuation of KIDNAPPED are

real enough to have made many suitors for their respective hands
among male readers of the book; - but that is nothing, reply the

critics of the other party: a walking doll will find suitors. The
question must stand over until some definite principles of

criticism have been discovered to guide us among these perilous
passes.

One character must never be passed over in an estimate of
Stevenson's work. The hero of his longest work is not David

Balfour, in whom the pawky Lowland lad, proud and precise, but 'a
very pretty gentleman,' is transfigured at times by traits that he

catches, as narrator of the story, from its author himself. But
Alan Breek Stewart is a greater creation, and a fine instance of

that wider morality that can seize by sympathy the soul of a wild
Highland clansman. 'Impetuous, insolent, unquenchable,' a condoner

of murder (for 'them that havenae dipped their hands in any little
difficulty should be very mindful of the case of them that have'),

a confirmed gambler, as quarrel-some as a turkey-cock, and as vain
and sensitive as a child, Alan Breek is one of the most lovable

characters in all literature; and his penetration - a great part of
which he learned, to take his own account of it, by driving cattle

'through a thronglowland country with the black soldiers at his
tail' - blossoms into the most delightful reflections upon men and

things.
The highest ambitions of a novelist are not easily attainable. To

combine incident, character, and romance in a uniform whole, to
alternate telling dramatic situation with effects of poetry and

suggestion, to breathe into the entire conception a profound
wisdom, construct it with absolute unity, and express it in perfect

style, - this thing has never yet been done. A great part of
Stevenson's subtle wisdom of life finds its readiest outlet in his

essays. In these, whatever their occasion, he shows himself the
clearest-eyed critic of human life, never the dupe of the phrases

and pretences, the theories and conventions, that distort the
vision of most writers and thinkers. He has an unerring instinct

for realities, and brushes aside all else with rapid grace. In his
lately published AMATEUR EMIGRANT he describes one of his fellow-

passengers to America:
'In truth it was not whisky that had ruined him; he was ruined long

before for all good human purposes but conversation. His eyes were
sealed by a cheap school-book materialism. He could see nothing in

the world but money and steam engines. He did not know what you
meant by the word happiness. He had forgotten the simple emotions

of childhood, and perhaps never encountered the delights of youth.
He believed in production, that useful figment of economy, as if it

had been real, like laughter; and production, without prejudice to
liquor, was his god and guide.'

This sense of the realities of the world, - laughter, happiness,
the simple emotions of childhood, and others, - makes Stevenson an

admirable critic of those social pretences that ape the native
qualities of the heart. The criticism on organised philanthropy

contained in the essay on BEGGARS is not exhaustive, it is
expressed paradoxically, but is it untrue?

'We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: gratitude and
charity. In real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is

not valued; it is received from the hand of friendship, or it is
resented. We are all too proud to take a naked gift; we must seem

to pay it, if in nothing else, then with the delights of our
society. Here, then, is the pitiful fix of the rich man; here is

that needle's eye in which he stuck already in the days of Christ,
and still sticks to-day, firmer, if possible, than ever; that he

has the money, and lacks the love which should make his money
acceptable. Here and now, just as of old in Palestine, he has the

rich to dinner, it is with the rich that he takes his pleasure: and
when his turn comes to be charitable, he looks in vain for a

recipient. His friends are not poor, they do not want; the poor
are not his friends, they will not take. To whom is he to give?

Where to find - note this phrase - the Deserving Poor? Charity is
(what they call) centralised; offices are hired; societies founded,