590 Professor Walter Baleigh [May 17, 



David Balfour and Miss Grant, Captain Nares and Mr. Dodd, 

 Alexander Mackellar and the Master of Ballantrae, Prince Otto and 

 Sir John Crabtree, or those wholly admirable pieces of special 

 pleading to be found in ' A Lodging for the Night ' and ' The Sire 

 de Maletroit's Door.' But people do not talk like this in actual 

 life — " 'tis true, 'tis pity ; and pity 'tis, 'tis true." They do not ; in 

 actual life conversation is generally so smeared and blurred with 

 stupidities, so invaded and dominated by the spirit of dulness, so 

 liable to swoon into meaninglessness, that to turn to Stevenson's 

 books is like an escape into mountain air from the stagnant vapours 

 of a morass. The exact reproduction of conversation as it occurs in 

 life can only be undertaken by one whose natural dulness feels itself 

 incommoded by wit and fancy as by a grit in the eye. Conversation 

 is often no more than a nervous habit of body, like twiddling the 

 thumbs, and to record each particular remark is as much as to describe 

 each particular twiddle. Or in its more intellectual uses, when speech 

 is employed, for instance, to conceal our thoughts, how often is it a 

 world too wide for the shrunken nudity of the thought it is meant to 

 veil, and thrown over it, formless, flabby, and black — like a tarpaulin ! 

 It is pleasant to see thought and feeling dressed for once in the trim, 

 bright raiment Stevenson devised for them. 



There is an indescribable air of distinction, which is, and is not, 

 one and the same thing with style, breathing from all his works. 

 Even when he is least inspired, his bearing and gait could never be 

 mistaken for another man's. All that he writes is removed by the 

 width of the spheres from the possibility of commonplace, and he 

 avoids most of the snares and pitfalls of genius with noble and 

 unconscious skill. 



If he ever fell into one of these — which may perhaps be doubted — 

 it was through too implicit a confidence in the powers of style. His 

 open letter to the Rev. Dr. Hyde in vindication of Father Damien is 

 perhaps his only literary mistake. It is a matchless piece of scorn 

 and invective, not inferior in skill to anything he ever wrote. But 

 that it was well done is no proof that it should have been done at all. 

 " I remember Uzzah and am afraid," said the wise Erasmus, when he 

 was urged to undertake the defence of Holy Church ; " it is not every 

 one who is permitted to support the Ark of the Covenant." And the 

 only disquietude suggested by Stevenson's letter is a doubt whether 

 he really has a claim to be Father Damien's defender, whether Father 

 Damien had need of the assistance of a literary freelance. The 

 Saint who was bitten in the hand by a serpent shook it off into the 

 fire and stood unharmed. As it was in the Mediterranean, so it was 

 also in the Pacific, and there is something officious in the intrusion 

 of a spectator, something irrelevant in the plentiful pronouns of the 

 first person singular to be found sprinkled over Stevenson's letter. 

 The curse spoken in Eden, "Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust 

 shalt thou eat all the days of thy life," surely covered by anticipation 

 the case of the Rev. Dr. Hyde. 



