1895.] on Bobert Louis Stevenson. 595 



scene in the arbour of Will's Inn. The wafted scent of the helio- 

 tropes, which had never been planted in the garden since Marjory's 

 death, the light in the room that had been hers, prelude the arrival at 

 the gate of the stranger's carriage, with the black pine tops standing 

 above it like plumes. And Will o' the Mill makes the acquaintance 

 of his physician and friend, and goes at last upon his travels. In 

 the other story, Markheim meets with his own double in the house of 

 the dealer in curiosities, whom he has murdered. It is not such a 

 double as Rossetti prayed for to the god of Sleep — 



" Ah ! might I, by thy good grace, 

 Groping in the windy stair, 

 (Darkness and the breath of space 



Like loud waters everywhere,) 

 Meeting mine own image there 



Face to face, 

 Send it from that place to her ! " 



but a clear-eyed critic of the murderer, not unfriendly, who lays 

 bare before him his motives and his history. At the close of that 

 wonderful conversation, one of the most brilliant of its author's 

 achievements, Markheim gives himself into the hands of the police. 

 These two stories, when compared with the others, serve to show 

 how Stevenson's imagination quickened and strengthened when it 

 played full upon life. For his best romantic effects, like all great 

 romance, are illuminative of life, and no mere idle games. 



III. Morality. 



His genius, like the genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne, was doubly 

 rich, in the spirit of romance and in a wise and beautiful morality. 

 But the irresponsible caprices of his narrative fancy prevented his 

 tales from being the appropriate vehicles of his morality. He has 

 left no work — unless the two short stories mentioned above be re- 

 garded as exceptions — in which romance and morality are welded 

 into a single perfect whole, nothing that can be put beside ' The 

 Scarlet Letter ' or ' The Marble Faun ' for deep insight and magic 

 fancy joined in one. Hence his essays, containing as they do the 

 gist of his reflective wisdom, are ranked by some critics above his 

 stories. 



A novel cannot, of course, be moral as an action is moral ; there 

 is no question in art of police regulations or conformity to established 

 codes, but rather of insight both deep and wide. Polygamy and 

 monogamy, suttee, thuggism, and cannibalism, are all acceptable to 

 the romancer, whose business is with the heart of man in all times 

 and places. He is not bound to display allegiance to particular 

 moral laws of the kind that can be broken ; he is bound to show his 

 consciousness of that wider moral order which can no more be broken 

 by crime than the law of gravitation can be broken by the fall of 



