Youth is autocratic, and can show a grand indifferency: it goes for what
it likes, and ignores all else--it fondly magnifies its favourites, and,
after all, to a great extent, it is but analysing, dealing with and
presenting itself to us, if we only watch well. This is the secret of
all prevailing romance: it is the secret of all stories of adventure and
chivalry of the simpler and more primitive order; and in one aspect it is
true that R. L. Stevenson loved and clung to the primitive and elemental,
if it may not be said, as one distinguished writer has said, that he even
loved savagery in itself. But hardly could it be seriously held, as Mr
I. Zangwill held:

"That women did not cut any figure in his books springs from this same
interest in the elemental. Women are not born, but made. They are a
social product of infinite complexity and delicacy. For a like reason
Stevenson was no interpreter of the modern. . . . A child to the end,
always playing at 'make-believe,' dying young, as those whom the gods
love, and, as he would have died had he achieved his centenary, he was
the natural exponent in literature of the child."

But there were subtly qualifying elements beyond what Mr Zangwill here
recognises and reinforces. That is just about as correct and true as
this other deliverance:

"His Scotch romances have been as over-praised by the zealous Scotsmen
who cry 'genius' at the sight of a kilt, and who lose their heads at a
waft from the heather, as his other books have been under-praised. The
best of all, _The Master of Ballantrae_, ends in a bog; and where the
author aspires to exceptional subtlety of character-drawing he befogs
us or himself altogether. We are so long weighing the brothers
Ballantrae in the balance, watching it incline now this way, now that,
scrupulously removing a particle of our sympathy from the one brother
to the other, to restore it again in the next chapter, that we end
with a conception of them as confusing as Mr Gilbert's conception of
Hamlet, who was idiotically sane with lucid intervals of lunacy."

If Stevenson was, as Mr Zangwill holds, "the child to the end," and the
child only, then if we may not say what Carlyle said of De Quincey:
"_Eccovi_, that child has been in hell," we may say, "_Eccovi_, that
child has been in unchildlike haunts, and can't forget the memory of
them." In a sense every romancer is a child--such w