re
pulling the same strings and playing on the same passions which are at
work in quieter methods around ourselves. The vast crimes and the
reckless bloodshed are nothing more nor less than stage effects used
to accentuate for the common eye what the seer can detect without
them.

"And reading him from this standpoint, Stevenson's 'message' (so far
as it was delivered) appears to be that of utter gloom--the creed that
good is always overcome by evil. We do not mean in the sense that
good always suffers through evil and is frequently crucified by evil.
That is only the sowing of the martyr's blood, which is, we know, the
seed of the Church. We should not have marvelled in the least that a
genius like Stevenson should rebel against mere external 'happy
endings,' which, being in flat contradiction to the ordinary ways of
Providence, are little short of thoughtless blasphemy against
Providence. But the terrible thing about the Stevenson philosophy of
life is that it seems to make evil overcome good in the sense of
absorbing it, or perverting it, or at best lowering it. When good and
evil come in conflict in one person, Dr Jekyll vanishes into Mr Hyde.
The awful Master of Ballantrae drags down his brother, though he seems
to fight for his soul at every step. The sequel to _Kidnapped_ shows
David Balfour ready at last to be hail-fellow-well-met with the supple
Prestongrange and the other intriguers, even though they had forcibly
made him a partner to their shedding of innocent blood.

"Is it possible that this was what Stevenson's experience of real life
had brought him? Fortunate himself in so many respects, he was yet
one of those who turn aside from the smooth and sunny paths of life,
to enter into brotherly sympathy and fellowship with the disinherited.
Is this, then, what he found on those darker levels? Did he discover
that triumphant hypocrisy treads down souls as well as lives?

"We cannot doubt that it often does so; and it is well that we should
see this sometimes, to make us strong to contend with evil before it
works out this, its worst mischief, and to rouse us from the easy
optimist laziness which sits idle while others are being wronged, and
bids them believe 'that all will come right in the end,' when it is
our direct duty to do our utmost to make it 'come right' to-day.

"But to show us nothi