40 Sir Sidney Golvin [Feb. 10, 



bilities. In {mother of his proverbial sayings Stevenson writes, " Acts 

 may be forgiven : not even God can forgive the hanger-back." Or 

 more emphatically : " Choose the best, if you can ; or choose the 

 worst ; that which hangs in the wind dangles from a gibbet." In 

 " Will o' the Mill," you will remember, Stevenson deals more gently 

 with the character of the hanger-back, setting forth the case that is 

 to be made for and against him in a manner ricli at once with human 

 shrewdness and with imaginative suggestion : evoking first the allure- 

 ment of the world's activities, tlien the self-apjjroving wisdom of the 

 man who decides to shirk them, then the circumstances which make 

 him doubt that wisdom, then the mysterious, the fragrant, the recon- 

 ciling approach of the great Unshirkable^Death. To combine genial 

 human narrative and subtle symbolic evocation iu this manner is 

 surely beyond the range of any but a true and great master : indeed 

 I know of no name but that of Nathaniel Hawthorne that in this 

 respect is fit to be coupled with Stevenson's. 



Coming to the longer tales and romances, it must be admitted 

 that we often find points of invention and construction lying very 

 open to criticism. " Kidnapped " seems nearly a faultless narrative ; 

 but in its sequel, " Catriona," we are disconcerted to find how little 

 the failure of the hero's great purpose of bearing witness in favour 

 of the innocent ajffects either his mind or the course of the story : and 

 that James More, even he, should leave his daughter resourceless and 

 alone on her landing in Holland is too great a strain on our credulity. 

 But there is none, I think, of Stevenson's tales in which the power 

 and charm of individual scenes and characters fail to carry us lightly 

 over such flaws. To take one instance from many — in that 

 fantasia on the sea and shipwrecks, as Stevenson calls it, the tale of 

 " The Merry Men," criticism may well doubt whether the invention 

 which ends the tale, of the black man chasing the conscience-tortured 

 and storm-demented Gordon Darnaway till both are drowned, is a 

 happy or satisfying one. But the flaw^ — if it is a flaw^ — scarcely 

 counts, with such high imaginative mastery is the main theme 

 rendered, that is the power and treachery and wickedness of the sea. 

 Read that story first : tiien turn to a tale far more famous and five 

 times as long — Hugo's " Travailleurs de la Mer " — and tell me which 

 rings the truer ; in which the words are the more charged and potent 

 with the double-distilled essence of the sea magic and the sea fury. 

 Again, it is a commonplace to find fault with the medicinal powders 

 which effect the transformation of the two personalities in Jekyll and 

 Hyde : but that was how the thing came to Stevenson in a dream, 

 and when the essential machinery of a tale or parable is given you in 

 a dream you must take it or leave it : change it you cannot. (Many 

 of you will remember how in an essay called " A Chapter on Dreams " 

 Stevenson narrates a first-rate story which came to him in sleep, but, 

 for certain reasons belonging to its essence, could not be used : and in 

 passing, let me suggest that passage as a model of the plain condensed 



