ng
why he did not more effectively employ it, I can't agree with him; and
this because of the presence of a certain atmosphere in the novels, alien
to free play of the individualities presented. Like Hawthorne's, like
the works of our great symbolists, they are restricted by a sense of some
obtaining conception, some weird metaphysical _weird_ or preconception.
This is the ground "Ian MacLaren" has for saying that "his kinship is not
with Boccaccio and Rabelais, but with Dante and Spenser"--the ground for
many remarks by critics to the effect that they still crave from him
"less symbol and more individuality"--the ground for the Rev. W. J.
Dawson's remark that "he has a powerful and persistent sense of the
spiritual forces which move behind the painted shows of life; that he
writes not only as a realist but as a prophet, his meanest stage being
set with eternity as a background."

Such expressions are fullest justification for what we have here said: it
adds, and can only add, to our admiration of Stevenson, as a thinker,
seer, or mystic, but the asserting sense of such power can only end in
lessening the height to which he could attain as a dramatic artist; and
there is much indeed against Mr Pinero's own view that, in the dramas, he
finds that "fine speeches" are ruinous to them as acting plays. In the
strict sense overfine speeches are yet almost everywhere. David Balfour
could never have writ some speeches attributed to him--they are just R.
L. Stevenson with a very superficial difference that, when once detected,
renders them curious and quaint and interesting, but not dramatic.

CHAPTER XIII--PREACHER AND MYSTIC FABULIST

In reality, Stevenson is always directly or indirectly preaching a
sermon--enforcing a moral--as though he could not help it. "He would
rise from the dead to preach a sermon." He wrote some first-rate fables,
and might indeed have figured to effect as a moralist-fabulist, as truly
he was from beginning to end. There was a bit of Bunyan in him as well
as of AEsop and Rousseau and Thoreau--the mixture that found coherency in
his most peculiarly patient and forbearing temper is what gives at once
the quaintness, the freedom, and yet the odd didactic something that is
never wanting. I remember a fable about the Devil that might well be
brought in to illustrate this here--careful readers who neglect nothing
that Stevenson wrote will remember it also and perhaps bear me out here.

But