1895.] on Robert Louis Stevenson, 597 



like these is combined in Stevenson with a vivid interest in, and 

 quick appreciation of, character. The variety of the characters that 

 he has essayed to draw is enormous, and his successes, for the purposes 

 of his stories, are many. Yet with all this, the number of lifelike 

 portraits, true to a hair, that are to be found in his works, is very 

 small indeed. In the golden glow of romance, character is always 

 subject to be idealised ; it is the effect of character seen at particular 

 angles and in special lights, natural or artificial, that Stevenson 

 paints : he does not attempt to analyse the complexity of its elements, 

 bul; boldly projects into it certain principles, and works from those. 

 It has often been said of Scott that he could not draw a lady who was 

 young and beautiful ; the glamour of chivalry blinded him, he lowered 

 his eyes and described his emotions and aspirations. Something of 

 the same disability afflicted Stevenson in the presence of a ruffian. 

 He loved heroic vice only less than he loved heroic virtue, and was 

 always ready to idealise his villains, to make of them men who, like 

 the Master of Ballantrae, "lived for an idea." Even the low and 

 lesser villainy of Israel Hands, in the great scene where he climbs 

 the mast to murder the hero of 'Treasure Island,' breathes out its 

 soul in a creed : — 



" ' For thirty years,' he said, ' I've sailed the seas, and seen good 

 and bad, better and worse, provisions running out, knives going, and 

 what not. Well, now, I tell you, I never seen good come o' goodness 

 yet. Him as strikes first is my fancy ; dead men don't bite ; them's 

 my views — Amen, so be it.' " 



John Silver, that memorable pirate, with a face like a ham and 

 an eye like a fragment of glass stuck into it, leads a career of whole- 

 hearted crime that can only be described as sparkling. His unalloyed 

 maleficence is adorned with a thousand graces of manner. Into the 

 dark and fetid marsh that is an evil heart, where low forms of sentiency 

 are hardly distinguishable from the all-pervading mud, Stevenson 

 never peered, unless it were in the study of Huish in * The Ebb Tide.' 



Of his women, let women speak. They are traditionally accredited 

 with an intuition of one another's hearts, although why, if woman 

 was created for man, as the Scriptures assure us, the impression that 

 she makes on him should not count for as much as the impression 

 she makes on some other woman, is a question that cries for solution. 

 Perhaps the answer is that disinterested curiosity, which is one means 

 of approach to the knowledge of character, although only one, is a 

 rare attitude for man to assume towards the other sex. Stevenson's 

 curiosity was late in awaking ; the heroine of ' The Black Arrow ' 

 is dressed in boy's clothes throughout the course of the story, and 

 the novelist thus saved the trouble of describing the demeanour of 

 a girl. Mrs. Henry, in ' The Master of Ballantrae,' is a charming 

 veiled figure, drawn in the shadow ; Miss Barbara Grant and Catriona 

 in the continuation of ' Kidnapped ' are real enough to have made 

 many suitors for their respective hands among male readers of the 

 book ; — but that is nothing, reply the critics of the other party ; a 

 Vol. XIV. (No. 89.) 2 s 



