preacher or poet can be called. If there be any who are beyond such human help, for them nothing remains but some sharp visitation of God, none being too sharp so as it effect the cure and give them back to themselves.1 The rest of Stevenson's philosophy of life may be summed up in the two great virtues of Honesty and Kindness. These seem simple enough, and to require little thought to understand their scope; but that is just where we commonly go wrong. We interpret them either far too narrowly or far too widely to be of any real value as finger-posts in the way of life. Thus, to hear some people talk of honesty you would suppose that the chief end of man was to avoid being hanged. If they keep their hands out of their neighbours' pockets, if they pay the wages of the market in solid coin of the realm, if they spend the time that is paid for at the desk, in the workshop, or behind the counter, they have fulfilled all the law and the prophets. This was not Stevenson's view. Honesty he held to be something much more wide-reaching. What it was in detail I do not propose here to discuss, but if you 1 See the poem The Celestial Surgeon. "If I have faltered more or less And to my dead heart run them in." wish to know what interpretation one who was himself the honestest of workers put upon this uncommonest of the virtues, I would refer you to the comparatively unknown essay, Lay Morals, from which I quote only a single sentence as a sample. It is, however, one that Edmund Burke himself might have written: "You can make no one understand that his bargain is anything more than a bargain, whereas in point of fact it is a link in the policy of mankind, and either a good or an evil to the world." While his aim is here to extend the scope of what is meant by honesty, in what he says of kindness he seems at times to go in the opposite direction, and be seeking to narrow it down to its simplest and most commonplace manifestations. "There is an idea abroad among moral people," he writes, "that they should make their neighbours good. One person I have to make good-myself. As for doing good, that is one of the professions that are full." In other passages he seems to go even further, and to drive this individualistic morality to the verge of paradox. "A. has as good a right to go to the Devil as we to Glory, and neither knows what he does." Phrases like these seem out of touch with the enlargement which we rightly seek in these days to give to the ancient virtue of charity when we insist that mere kindness is not enough, but that for the redress of the "world-pain" we require a sterner virtue, bearing a closer resemblance to justice than to charity. Stevenson, we know from his letters, had no lack of sympathy with this extension of the scope of human kindness. His fear was lest in the process of extension 1 it might lose something of the sweetness and graciousness, the readiness to consider circumstances and to make allowance, to suffer long and yet be kind-all, in fact, that the Greeks understood by the equitable spirit which is the higher form of justice. For the rest he held that when the question lies between the near and the distant, the duty to kin and the duty to kind, the knowledge and the talent of the vast majority of us fit us better for the former than for the latter. From this point of view, who could desire a better summary of the whole duty of man than the following? "To be honest, to be kind, to earn a little and spend a little less, to make (upon the whole) a family happier for his presence; to renounce, when that shall be necessary, and not be embittered; to keep a few friends, but that without capitulation. Above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself. Here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy." For these headings of a moral philosophy I have gone to the Essays and Poems, and especially to Lay Morals, where Stevenson sought to set them out in some connection and system. It remains to ask whether they have any counterpart in his stories of adventure, whether the moralist is traceable in the writer of romance. Not prima facie, as we have seen, a promising task. True, some of the shorter stories are conscious illustrations of moral ideas. The reader will think of the best-known of them, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But there are others, such as Markheim and Will o' the Mill, in which the union of the romantic and the ethical, though less apparent, is far subtler, and more suggestive. Yet these form only a fragment of his work, and with Dr. Jekyll thrown in could be put together in a couple of hundred pages. What are we to say of the rest of them? What are we to say of the swearing, fighting, plundering, buccaneering crew which turns up in detachments in all of them, and of the whole round of breathless adventure in which it engages, dear to the heart of man and boy alike for no other reason than that it seems to be narrated for its own sole and simple sake? Of this, as of all other genuine romances, two things remain to be said-Stevenson himself has said them, or at least one of them, in so many words. First: Morality is not the pinchbeck affair its advocates would sometimes have us believe. It is not any mere part of life, not even three-fourths of it, not any vulgar fraction whatever, but simply the whole of it. Reckoned in this way, you cannot get it into a catechism or copy-book, nor into any book at all, any more than you can get all the sunshine into a picture or the whole music of the sphere into a sonata. At the best the moralising writer (and who that is great is not?) will fail; at the worst, if he is true to life himself, he cannot help getting some in. Now these stories and the characters, that are the soul of them, have a bit of morality, and if Stevenson's ideas about it are true, a good solid bit of their own. The first duty of man, on Stevenson's philosophy, as we have seen, is to be alive, and alive his villains certainly are. They "play the merry game of warre" against all social and moral covenants with such zest, such light-heartedness, that the most puritanic reader is bound to share in their gleeful enormities. They devote themselves to crime with a cheerful strenuousness, a whole-mindedness, a richness of ingenuity, and a singleness of purpose which is positively stimulating to the moral sense. Others may suffer from the disillusionment and paralysis of repentance, not they. Their villainy is whole-souled and thorough-going to the last. "Even the lower and lesser villainy of Israel Hands" (to quote again from Professor Raleigh) "breathes out his soul in a creed. 'For thirty years 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 of goodness yet. Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don't bite, them's my views. Amen, so it be.'" Something like this was probably in Mr. J. M. Barrie's mind when he found in these romances the incarnate spirit of boyhood tugging at the skirts of the old world and compelling it to come back and play. The boy truly is there making his readers boys together with him, not in the Auld Lang Syne of an irresponsible past, but in all the toil and travail of their vexed and complicated lives. The boy is there, but the poet and artist is there too, who to Stevenson's thinking has a further and more helpful office still. In the direct teaching upon conduct which we have reviewed we found an underlying current of protest against the paralysing force of custom. But the matter does not end here, and Stevenson was as convinced of the deadening and estranging effect of conventional modes of seeing and describing the things about us as of conventional mode of action. He would have agreed with the saying of Heraclitus: "Men are estranged from the word that is most familiar to them: what they daily meet is a stranger to them." To break this fatal power of custom to overspread and ossify the meaning of words and things, he held to be the great mission of |