594: Professor Walter Raleigh [May 17, 



thread, like the pageant of a dream, and the reader feels and sym- 

 pathises with the author's obvious difficulty in bringing it back to 

 the scene of the trial and execution of James Stewart. ' The Master 

 of Ballantrae' is stamped with a magnificent unity of conception, 

 but the story illuminates that conception by a series of scattered 

 episodes. That lurid embodiment of fascinating evil, part vampire, 

 part Mephistopheles, whose grand manner and. heroic abilities might 

 have made him a great and good man but "for the malady of not 

 wanting," is the light and meaning of the whole book. Innocent and 

 benevolent lives are thrown in his way that he may mock or distort 

 or shatter them. Stevenson never came nearer than in this character 

 to the sublime of power. 



But an informing principle of unity is more readily to be appre- 

 hended in the shorter stories, and it is a unity not so much of plot 

 as of impression and atmosphere. His islands, whether situated in 

 the Pacific or off the coast of Scotland, have each of them a climate 

 of its own, and the character of the place seems to impose itself on 

 the incidents that occur, dictating subordination or contrast. The 

 events that happen within the limits of one of these magic isles could 

 in every case be cut off from the rest of the story and framed as a 

 separate work of art. The long starvation of David Balfour on the 

 island of Earraid, the sharks of crime and monsters of blasphemy 

 that break the peace of the shining tropical lagoons in ' Treasure 

 Island ' and ' The Ebb Tide,' the captivity on the Bass Bock in 

 ' Catriona,' the supernatural terrors that hover and mutter over the 

 island of * The Merry Men,' — these imaginations are plainly gene- 

 rated by the scenery against which they are thrown ; each is in some 

 sort the genius of the place it inhabits. 



In his search for the treasures of romance, Stevenson adventured 

 freely enough into the realm of the supernatural. When he is 

 handling the superstitions of the Scottish people, he allows his 

 humorous enjoyment of their extravagance to peep out from behind the 

 solemn dialect in which they are dressed. The brief tale of ' Thrawn 

 Janet,' and Black Andy's story of Tod Lapraik in ' Catriona,' are 

 grotesque imaginations of the school of ' Tam o' Shanter ' rather than 

 of the school of Shakespeare, who deals in no comedy ghosts. They 

 are turnip-lanterns swayed by a laughing urchin, proud of the fears 

 he can awaken. Even the ' Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ' 

 and the story of ' The Bottle Imp ' are manufactured bogies, that 

 work on the nerves and not on the heart, whatever may be said by 

 those who -insist on seeing allegory in what is only dream-fantasy. 

 The supernatural must be rooted deeper than these in life and expe- 

 rience if it is to reach an imposing stature : the true ghost is the 

 shadow of a man. And Stevenson shows a sense of this in two of his 

 very finest stories, the exquisite idyll of * Will o' the Mill ' and the 

 grim history of ' Markheim.' Each of these stories is the work of a 

 poet, by no means of a goblin-fancier. The personification of Death 

 is as old as poetry : it is wrought with moving gentleness in that last 



