e unassisted
imagination of man but a poor and sterile thing, tending constantly
towards some ossified convention. "Treasure Island" is a much better
story than "The Wreckers," yet I, for one, shall never cease to regret
that Mr Stevenson did not possess, when he wrote "Treasure Island,"
that knowledge of what men and schooners do in wild seas that was his
when he gave us "The Wreckers." The detail would have been so much
richer and more convincing.

It is open to any one to say that these tales are barbarous, and what
Mrs Meynell, in a very clever and amusing essay, has called
"decivilised." Certainly there is a wide gulf separating life on a
Pacific island from the accumulated culture of centuries of
civilisation in the midst of which such as Mrs Meynell move and have
their being. And if there can be nothing good in literature that does
not spring from that culture, these stories must stand condemned. But
such a view is surely too narrow. Much as I admire that lady's
writings, I never can think of a world from which everything was
eliminated that did not commend itself to the dainty taste of herself
and her friends, without a feeling of impatience and suffocation. It
takes a huge variety of men and things to make a good world. And
ranches and CANONS, veldts and prairies, tropical forests and coral
islands, and all that goes to make up the wild life in the face of
Nature or among primitive races, far and free from the artificial
conditions of an elaborate civilisation, form an element in the world,
the loss of which would be bitterly felt by many a man who has never
set foot outside his native land.

There is a certain monotony, perhaps, about these stories. To some
extent this is inevitable. The interest and passions of South Sea
Island life are neither numerous nor complex, and action is apt to be
rapid and direct. A novelist of that modern school that fills its
volumes, often fascinatingly enough, by refining upon the shadowy
refinements of civilised thought and feeling, would find it hard to ply
his trade in South Sea Island society. His models would always be
cutting short in five minutes the hesitations and subtleties that ought
to have lasted them through a quarter of a life-time. But I think it is
possible that the English reader might gather from this little book an
unduly strong impression of the uniformity of Island life. The loves of
white men and brown women, often cynical and brutal, sometimes
exquisit