He is a casuistic moralist, if not a Shorter Catechist, as Mr Henley put it in his clever sonnet.He is constantly asking himself about moral laws and how they work themselves out in character, especially as these suggest and involve the casuistries of human nature.He is often a little like Nathaniel Hawthorne, but he hardly follows them far enough and rests on his own preconceptions and predilections, only he does not, like him, get into or remain long in the cobwebby corners - his love of the open air and exercise derived from generations of active lighthouse engineers, out at all times on sea or land, or from Scottish ministers who were fond of composing their sermons and reflecting on the backwardness of human nature as they walked in their gardens or along the hillsides even among mists and storms, did something to save him here, reinforcing natural cheerfulness and the warm desire to give pleasure.His excessive elaboration of style, which grew upon him more and more, giving throughout often a sense of extreme artificiality and of the self-consciousness usually bred of it, is but another incidental proof of this.And let no reader think that I wish here to decry R.L.Stevenson.I only desire faithfully to try to understand him, and to indicate the class or group to which his genius and temperament really belong.He is from first to last the idealistic dreamy or mystical romancer, and not the true idealist or dealer direct with life or character for its own sake.The very beauty and sweetness of his spirit in one way militated against his dramatic success - he really did not believe in villains, and always made them better than they should have been, and that, too, on the very side where wickedness - their natural wickedness - is most available - on the stage.The dreamer of dreams and the Shorter Catechist, strangely united together, were here directly at odds with the creative power, and crossed and misdirected it, and the casuist came in and manoeuvred the limelight - all too like the old devil of the mediaeval drama, who was made only to be laughed at and taken lightly, a buffoon and a laughing-stock indeed.And while he could unveil villainy, as is the case pre-eminently in Huish in the EBB-TIDE, he shrank from inflicting the punishments for which untutored human nature looks, and thus he lost one great aid to crude dramatic effect.As to his poems, they are intimately personal in his happiest moments: he deals with separate moods and sentiments, and scarcely ever touches those of a type alien to his own.The defect of his child poems is distinctly that he is everywhere strictly recalling and reproducing his own quaint and wholly exceptional childhood; and children, ordinary, normal, healthy children, will not take to these poems (though grown-ups largely do so), as they would to, say, the LILLIPUT LEVEE of my old friend, W.B.Rands.Rands showed a great deal of true dramatic play there within his own very narrow limits, as, at all events, adults must conceive them.
Even in his greatest works, in THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE and WEIR OF
HERMISTON, the special power in Stevenson really lies in subduing his characters at the most critical point for action, to make them prove or sustain his thesis; and in this way the rare effect that he might have secured DRAMATICALLY is largely lost and make-believe substituted, as in the Treasure Search in the end of THE MASTER OF
BALLANTRAE.The powerful dramatic effect he might have had in his DENOUEMENT is thus completely sacrificed.The essence of the drama for the stage is that the work is for this and this alone -
