art was to have been limited to
presiding at the _first_ trial, where the persons wrongly suspected were
to have been judged, and to directing that the law should take its
course when evidence incriminating his own son was unexpectedly brought
forward?

Whether the final escape and union of Archie and Christina would have
proved equally essential to the plot may perhaps to most readers seem
questionable. They may rather feel that a tragic destiny is foreshadowed
from the beginning for all concerned, and is inherent in the very
conditions of the tale. But on this point, and other matters of general
criticism connected with it, I find an interesting discussion by the
author himself in his correspondence. Writing to Mr. J. M. Barrie,
under date November 1, 1892, and criticising that author's famous story
of "The Little Minister," Stevenson says:--

"Your descriptions of your dealings with Lord Rintoul are frightfully
unconscientious.... 'The Little Minister' ought to have ended badly; we
all know it _did_, and we are infinitely grateful to you for the grace
and good feeling with which you have lied about it. If you had told the
truth, I for one could never have forgiven you. As you had conceived and
written the earlier parts, the truth about the end, though indisputably
true to fact, would have been a lie, or what is worse, a discord, in
art. If you are going to make a book end badly, it must end badly from
the beginning. Now, your book began to end well. You let yourself fall
in love with, and fondle, and smile at your puppets. Once you had done
that, your honour was committed: at the cost of truth to life you were
bound to save them. It is the blot on 'Richard Feverel,' for instance,
that it begins to end well; and then tricks you and ends ill. But in
this case, there is worse behind, for the ill ending does not inherently
issue from the plot--the story had, in fact, ended well after the great
last interview between Richard and Lucy--and the blind, illogical bullet
which smashes all has no more to do between the boards than a fly has to
do with a room into whose open window it comes buzzing. It might have so
happened; it needed not; and unless needs must, we have no right to pain
our readers. I have had a heavy case of conscience of the same kind
about my Braxfield story. Braxfield--only his name is Hermiston--has a
son who is condemned to death; plainly there is a fine tempting fitness
about this; and I meant he was to