r,)ll] 0)1 Rolifirt Louis StPVP)ison. Ah 



that such things should be kindled in the fire of imagination till 

 they burned in a light as vivid and thrilling as the light oF beauty, 

 although different— even the light, if need be, of horror. "Your 

 remarks about the ugly," he once wrote to Mr. Henley, " are my eye, 

 ugliness is only the prose of horror. It is when you are not able to 

 write ' Macbeth ' that you write ' Therese Raquin.' Fashions are 

 external : in any case, and under any fashion, the great man produces 

 beauty, terror, and mirth, and the little man produces cleverness 

 instead of beauty, ugliness instead of terror, and jokes instead of 

 mirth. As it was in the beginning, is now, and shall be ever, world 

 without end. Amen." 



So much for his ideas on the romantic element in art. As for 

 his ideas on the moral element, the word of course includes all the 

 critical phases of passion and emotion. But with Stevenson let it be 

 remembered — a Scotchman, a son of the Covenanters— there entered 

 into the conception of a moral crisis more of what in the ordinary 

 sense is called morality than with many writers of fiction. A great 

 deal of modern fiction, whether following the romantic or the realistic 

 method, has dealt with life as though it were made up of nothing 

 but the play and strife of passion and circumstance : as though it 

 were emptied of those other complications that spring from the 

 conflict of duty and desire, the strivings of the conscience, the 

 longing for right, the claims of one right against another. A singular 

 impoverishment of the elements of life and of the themes and oppor- 

 tunities of art ! The human conscience is an ancient organ indeed : 

 ancient, but not yet disused. Stevenson at least was the last man to 

 think it so. Perhaps the passage in all his writings which, next 

 to the verses I have already quoted, is most characteristic of his 

 deeper mind is the well-known one from " Pulvis et Umbra " : — 



"If the first view of this creature, stalking in his rotatory isle, 

 l)e a thing to shake the courage of the stoutest, on this nearer sight 

 he startles us with an admiring wonder. It matters not where we 

 look, under what climate we observe him, in what stage of society, 

 in what depth of ignorance, burthened with what erroneous morality ; 

 by camp-fires in Assiniboia, the snow powdering his shoulders, the 

 wind plucking his blanket, as he sits, passing the ceremonial calumet 

 and uttering his grave opinions like a Roman senator ; in ships at 

 sea, a man inured to hardship and vile pleasures, his brightest hope 

 a fiddle in a tavern and a bedizened trull who sells herself to rob him, 

 and he, for all that, simple, innocent, cheerful, kindly like a child, 

 constant to toil, brave to drown, for others ; in the slums of cities, 

 moving among indifferent millions to mechanical employments, with- 

 out hope of change in the future, with scarce a pleasure in the present, 

 and yet true to his virtues, honest up to his lights, kind to his 

 neighbours, tempted perhaps in vain by the briglit gin-palace, perhaps 

 long-suffering with the drunken wife that ruins him ; in India (a 

 woman this time), kneeling with broken cries and streaming tears, as 



